Women at the Hague; the International Congress of Women and its results

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WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

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TORONTO

WOMEN AT THE
HAGUE '

The International Congress of Women
and its Results

BY THREE DELEGATES TO THE CONGRESS
FROM THE UNITED STATES

JANE ADDAMS

PRESIDENT INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF WOMEN AT THE HAGUE
AND OF THE WOMAN'S PEACE PARTY OF AMERICA

EMILY G. BALCH

PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, WELLESLEY COLLEGE

ALICE HAMILTON

INVESTIGATOR OF INDUSTRIAL DISEASES, UNITED STATES
DEPARTMENT OF LABOR

1916

Wtfo fotk
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

All rights reserved

COPYRIGHT, 1915,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 19x5.

J. 8. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Muss., U.S.A.

Adtw
do ^p.^5,

PREFATORY NOTE

THE following pages give an account of the
International Congress of Women, convened at
The Hague in April, 1915, and of the journeys
undertaken by two delegations from that Congress.

Much of the material has already appeared in
The Survey, and is obviously journalistic in char-
acter. It may be of value, however, during these
days of much war correspondence, as a report of
European conditions from the point of view of
that peace sentiment which survives in the midst
of every war, but which is -not easily uncovered.

If an apology were needed for putting such
slight material into a book, it may be stated that
the widespread interest in the separate articles
seemed to justify presenting them in convenient
form.

It is further hoped that this recital by three
American women may correct the impression made
upon the public by the contradictory accounts
given through the press, and that the reader may
become interested in the official report of the
Congress.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. JOURNEY AND IMPRESSIONS OF THE CON-
GRESS . . . Emily G. Balch i
II. AT THE WAR CAPITALS Alice Hamilton 22

III. THE REVOLT AGAINST WAR Jane Addams 55

(a) By Certain Young Men . >^« . 59

(b) By Groups of Civilians . . . 75

IV. FACTORS IN CONTINUING THE WAR .

Jane Addams 82

(a) The Censored Press . . . 82

(£) Isolation of Peace Advocates . . 87

(c) No Adequate Offer of Negotiations . 92
V. AT THE NORTHERN CAPITALS Emily G. Balch 99

VI. THE TIME FOR MAKING PEACE .

Emily G. Balch in
VII. WOMEN AND INTERNATIONALISM .

'( Jane Addams 124

APPENDICES

Opinions of the Congress . . . . . 143
Some Particulars about the Congress , . .146
Resolutions adopted by the Congress ; Manifesto
issued by the Delegations ; Synopsis of Argu-
ment on Continuous Mediation without Armis-
tice ; by Julia Grace Wales, a delegate to the
Congress from the University of Wisconsin . 150
vii

WOMEN AT THE
HAGUE

CHAPTER I

JOURNEY AND IMPRESSIONS OF THE
CONGRESS

EMILY G. BALCH

WHEN 1 I sailed on the Noordam in April
with the forty-two other American del-
egates to the International Congress of
Women at The Hague, it looked doubtful
to me, as it did to many others, how
valuable the meeting could be made. I felt,
however, that even a shadow of chance to serve
the cause of peace could not to-day be refused.

1 A letter, with additions and changes, written from The
Hague, May 5, 1915, to the students of Wellesley College;
printed in The Wellesley College News, and in part in Jus
Suffragi, London.

B I

2 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

Never have I been so thankful for any
decision. As I look at it now, the under-
taking repaid all that it cost us a hundred-
fold.

In this world upheaval the links that bind
the peoples have been strained and snapped
on every side. Of all the international
gatherings that help to draw the nations
together, since the fatal days of July, 1914,
practically none have been convened. Science,
medicine, reform, labor, religion — not one
of these causes has been able as yet to gather
its followers from across the dividing frontiers.

The women, fifteen hundred of them and
more, have come together and for four days
conferred, not on remote and abstract ques-
tions but on the vital subject of international
relations. English and Scotch, German,
Austrian, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Belgian,
Dutch, American, Danish, Norwegian, and
Swedish all were represented. The French,
alas, have not been able to be with us, but on
the other hand the French women have been
the earliest to actually form their national
organization in support of the programme
worked out at the Congress.

JOURNEY AND IMPRESSIONS 3

Our whole experience has been an interest-
ing one. Sunny weather and a boat steadied
by a heavy load of grain made it possible
for the forty-two American delegates to the
Hague Congress to meet and study and
deliberate together during the voyage. The
secretary of the Chicago Peace Society, who
had come with us, gave a brief course of
lectures on peace questions, and after these
were over we set about the consideration of
the preliminary programme submitted to us
by the committee at The Hague who were
arranging the Congress. Some days we
met morning, afternoon, and evening and we
added largely to the contents of the pro-
gramme as sent to us. We recommended
the so-called '' Wisconsin Plan " for con-
tinuous mediation without armistice. This
plan, as formulated by one of our delegates,
Miss Wales, an instructor in the English
department at the University of Wisconsin,
had been officially endorsed by the Wisconsin
Legislature and recommended by them to the
consideration of the Congress of the United
States. We had just succeeded in working
out our proposals by the time we sighted

4 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

land, and it was well we had done so, for,
though we were on the Noordam for five
days longer, we were hardly placid enough
to work to advantage.

We were first stopped one evening under
the menace of a little machine gun trained
full upon us by a boat alongside while two
German stowaways were taken off and
searched and carried away. If the pro-
ceeding had been staged for dramatic pur-
poses, it could not have been more effective.
One prisoner, with a rope about him to pre-
vent his escaping or falling overboard,
shouted Hoch der Kaiser, Deutschland uber
Alles before he stepped upon the swaying
ladder over the ship's side ; both prisoners
in the boat below us, with hands held up
above their heads, were searched in front
of that ever-pointing little cannon, then the
sailors carried blankets and cups of hot
coffee to them in the hold. All this, lighted
by the ship's lanterns, was just below us as
we hung over the ship's side. Every now
and then out of the darkness a new vessel
drew up to us. At one time five were along-
side.

JOURNEY AND IMPRESSIONS 5

At last we were allowed to proceed, but
not for long. Next morning not far from
Dover we were stopped again and there we
were held motionless for four mortal days,
almost like prisoners of war. We chafed
and fretted and telegraphed and brought to
bear all the influence that we could command,
but there we stuck, not allowed to land, not
allowed to have any one come aboard, and
for all one day, Sunday, with no chance even
to send or receive messages. When telegrams
were possible they were severely censored,
and no indication of our whereabouts was
allowed. "All in the Downs our fleet was
moored," the old song says, and so it was and
so was the Noordam. Around us were
vessels not only of the English fleet, but of
every sort, Norwegian, Greek, Spanish, and
plain "United States," all with immense
flags painted on their sides. Despatch boats,
torpedo boats, and torpedo destroyers rushed
past, sometimes five in a string; a silver-
glistening dirigible, probably scouting for
submarines, was visible all one lovely after-
noon. Once we saw firing, probably the
shooting of a stray mine. Inshore gleamed

6 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

the white and green of the chalk cliffs, and
a cosy old windmill twirled its leisurely
arms.

It was pretty, it was interesting, but as
the days slipped by and the date of the
Congress drew near and people spoke of
possible weeks of delay, it grew harder and
harder to bear. At last, twenty minutes
after getting a telegram from Ambassador
Page saying that he could do nothing for us,
we were released as mysteriously as we had
been stopped, and by Tuesday afternoon
were landing in Rotterdam. The first ses-
sion of the Congress was scheduled for
eight that evening at The Hague. We got
through the formalities of passports and
customs, took the train to the capital city,
only half an hour away, were assigned to
hotels by a friendly Dutch Committee of
hospitality, washed and dined more or
less, and were on the spot — in time, after
all.

Not so the English delegation, 180 of
them all told. The Governments had granted
passports to only twenty and even of these
not one could leave England, as all traffic, in-

JOURNEY AND IMPRESSIONS 7

eluding mails, was stopped for the time be-
ing between England and Holland. Happily
Mrs. Pethick-Lawrence had come over
on the Noordam and Miss MacMillan and
Miss Courtney had gone to The Hague earlier
and the three did yeoman service through-
out the Congress. From France no women
could or would come, from Russia and Servia
none, and from Japan quite naturally none.
From the other great belligerent nations
Germany sent a splendid group of twenty-
eight women, among the most impressive
of whom were Dr. Augspurg and Frl. Hey-
mann. From Belgium five women came a
day after the Congress had begun. They
were given an ovation, and one of the German
members of the presiding committee moved
that they all be invited to seats on the
platform, and this was done. Among the
neutral nations the Dutch were naturally
most largely represented; it is not quite
easy to say how many of those who thronged
the hall were members of the Congress and
how many were visitors only, but apparently
there were about noo voting. The next
largest group were the Americans, about

8 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

fifty in all, for some eight had gone earlier
than the party on the Noordam. Norway,
Sweden, and Denmark were all well repre-
sented with respectively twelve, sixteen, and
six each.

The Congress was too large for any of the
rooms at the Peace Palace or the famous
Ridderzaal and met in a great hall at the
Dierentuin. In general the mornings were
given to business and the evenings to public
addresses, while the afternoons were free
for committee meetings and, to those not
so occupied, for making friends and seeing
sights. The most wonderful of these were
the tulip fields near Haarlem, great stretches
of solid color. There proved to be so much
to do that in spite of making very good
progress at each meeting two extra sessions,
one Friday afternoon and one Saturday
morning, were added.

The programme and rules of order agreed
on from the first shut out all discussions
of relative national responsibility for the
present war or the conduct of it or of
methods of conducting future wars. We
met on the common ground beyond —

JOURNEY AND IMPRESSIONS 9

the ground of preparation for permanent
peace.

The two fundamental planks, adherence
to which was a condition of membership,
were : (a) That international disputes should
be settled by pacific means; (b) that the
Parliamentary franchise should be extended
to women.

This meant a very substantial unity of
opinion, which greatly facilitated the dis-
cussions, and I think that this is perhaps a
sufficient justification of the policy which
has been criticised in some quarters of mak-
ing this Congress a suffrage as well as a
peace meeting. Some of those present at
the Congress, some of the Dutch ladies
especially, and many of us Americans, also,
felt that the suffrage element was over-
stressed ; but, after all, it was the question
of peace that, out and out, dominated the
discussions and focussed our purpose and
interest. Yet I hear that many Dutch
ladies went opposed to suffrage and came
away convinced that if women are to do
anything effective for peace they must have
a voice in public questions.

10 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

A series of brilliant evening meetings were
held during the Congress, at which the
chair was taken respectively by Dr. Aletta
Jacobs, of Holland, Dr. Anita Augspurg, of
Germany, and Miss Chrystal MacMillan, of
England.

On the first evening, Dr. Aletta Jacobs,
the President of the Dutch Executive Com-
mittee, in welcoming the members of the
Congress, expressed her appreciation of the
courage shown by those women who had
braved all the dangers, risks, and difficulties
of travelling in war time from one country
to another.

"With mourning hearts we stand united
here," she said. "We grieve for many brave
young men who have lost their lives on the
battlefield before attaining their full man-
hood; we mourn with the poor mothers
bereft of their sons ; with the thousands of
young widows and fatherless children, and
we feel that we can no longer endure in
this twentieth century of civilization that
governments should tolerate brute force
as the only solution of international dis-
putes."

JOURNEY AND IMPRESSIONS II

Dr. Jacobs proceeded to explain why the
Congress had been called in the midst of
the war instead of postponing it until the
days of peace, and indicated how many
more difficulties such an international gather-
ing would present if it had to include repre-
sentatives of both victorious and conquered
nations.

"Although our efforts may not shorten
the present war," she exclaimed, "there is
no doubt that this pacific assemblage of so
many nations will have its moral effect
upon the belligerent countries. . . . Those
of us who have convened this Congress, how-
ever, have never called it a PEACE CONGRESS,
but an International Congress of Women
assembled to protest against war, and to
suggest steps which may lead to warfare
becoming an impossibility."

The meeting was further addressed by
Miss Lindhagen, a town councillor of Stock-
holm, Sweden, Mrs. Pethick-Lawrence of
Great Britain, and others.

At the public meeting of the second even-
ing of the Congress, there was not a vacant
seat in the large hall. The meeting was

12 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

addressed by Miss Holbrook, of Chicago,
on the resolution which was passed at the
preceding meeting as to the education of
children; by Mrs. De jong Van Beek en
Donk of The Hague, who showed herself
master of the subject, on Arbitration and Con-
ciliation ; and by Mme. Rosika Schwimmer,
who gave one of her most stirring addresses.

On the third evening the meeting was
addressed by Miss Thora Daugaard of Den-
mark, Miss Kathleen Courtney of England,
Miss Leonora O'Reilly of the Women's
Trades Union League of the United States,
by the President of the Congress, and others,
including Frau Lecher of Austria, who made
one of the most touching speeches of the
Congress. She had been in the very midst
of the miseries of war for months in her own
country, working in the hospitals, where she
had seen the most intense suffering borne
without complaint; but what was the use
of healing wounds if they were to be torn
open again ?

At each of the evening meetings greetings
were read from individuals and organizations,
in many countries, including Bulgaria, Ice-

JOURNEY AND IMPRESSIONS 13

land, Portugal, Poland, Turkey, and from
such women as Olive Schreiner, Ellen Key,
and Mrs. Chapman Catt. More than three
hundred such formal greetings were received,
of which only a small portion could be read.
About thirty protests were also received.

One of the most warmly debated questions
was on Madame Schwimmer's proposal,
which was finally accepted, to send delegates
to the different capitals, both belligerent and
neutral, to carry to them the resolutions
voted by the Congress.

The programme that has been worked out
is, I feel, a very able document ; certain
good authorities think that, profiting as it
did by many preceding studies and con-
gresses, it is the best peace platform that
has yet been drawn up.1 It would make an
admirable basis for a brief study by an
individual, or a club, or a little group of
friends, of the problem of peace in the con-
structive sense. For what we are working

1 The official report of the International Congress of

Women at The Hague, or copies of the resolutions, may be

obtained from the Women's Peace Party of America, at
116 So. Michigan Ave., Chicago.

14 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

for is not what our English friends call
"damp angel Peace," not stagnation, nor
quietism, not a weak giving way to pres-
sure, but a world in which national
activities reenforce instead of neutralizing
one another.

A very curious thing has been the attitude
of the majority of the press representatives
who were present. Most of them apparently
had been sent to get an amusing story of an
international peace gathering of women —
"base and silly" enough to try to meet in
war time — breaking up in quarrel. Day by
day they went away with faces long with dis-
appointment. "Nothing doing to-day, but
something worth while may happen to-mor-
row." In England the Congress was re-
ported to be managed in the interest of
Germany; in Germany the delegates were
threatened with social boycott for attending
a pro-British meeting; and in many coun-
tries the meetings were reported to have
been either practically unattended or to
have closed in a row. Nothing could be
further from the truth than all these stories.
The largest hall in The Hague was needed

JOURNEY AND IMPRESSIONS 15

for the meetings, over two thousand often
being present; and, difficult as it is to con-
duct business with so mixed and differing
a constituency, with different languages,
different rules of parliamentary procedure,
and divergent views, Miss Addams and the
other officials carried on orderly and effective
sessions, marked by the most active will for
unity that I have ever felt in an assemblage.

What stands out most strongly among all
my impressions of those thrilling and strained
days at The Hague is the sense of the wonder
of the beautiful spirit of the brave, self-
controlled women who dared ridicule and
every sort of difficulty to express a passionate
human sympathy, not inconsistent with pa-
triotism, but transcending it.

The sessions were heavily fraught with
emotion, it could not be otherwise, but the
emotion found little expression in words.
When it did, it was on a high and noble
plane. There was something profoundly
stirring and inexpressibly inspiriting in the
attitude of these women, many of them so
deeply stricken, so closely bound to the
cause of their country as they understand

16 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

it, yet so full of faith in the will for good of
their technical enemies and so united in
their common purpose to find the principles
on which permanent relations of international
friendship and cooperation can ultimately
be established.

There was not one clash or even danger
of a clash over national differences ; on every
hand was the same moving consciousness of
the development of a new spirit which is
growing in the midst of the war as the roots
of the wheat grow under the drifts and
tempests of winter.

Because there were no clashes along
national lines, it must not be thought,
however, that the Congress was stagnantly
placid. People cared too much for the sub-
ject under debate for that to be possible.
There were most vigorous differences of
opinion over details, and some energetic
misunderstandings, for which the necessity
of translating each speech into two other
languages supplied many openings, besides
the difficulties arising from different par-
liamentary usages. One's every faculty was
on the stretch hour after hour, and we

JOURNEY AND IMPRESSIONS 17

wondered afterwards why we felt so ex-
hausted.

, I have spoken of the impression made on
me by the friendliness of the women from the
warring countries. Perhaps the next most
powerful impressions were, first, the closer
sense of the tragic horror of the war, of which
some of the women bore the imprint in their
very faces, not to speak of what they said ;
and, secondly, of the fear of the men and
women of the neutral countries, lest they,
too, be dragged into the pit where the other
nations are struggling. The women who
have the vote (that is, the Norwegian and
Danish, for the Finnish women could not
get to The Hague) showed an additional
timidity — the timidity of those who are
in a critical and delicate situation, and who,
being themselves jointly responsible, have
to take every step with the greatest dis-
creetness.

Since the close of the Congress some of
those of us who have been chosen to go as
delegates to various Governments have called
on some of the foreign ministers at The
Hague as a preliminary step and some

1 8 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

very illuminating things have been said to
us. One of the ministers said the most
important thing that We could do was to
help to educate children away from JQiilita-
rism. Another deprecated all agitation of
the subject of peace, as it weakens the energy
for war in case war comes.

It has been a surprise to me to find how
much this very innocent gathering has been
regarded. I imagined that it might very
likely simply be ignored. On the contrary,
it gives considerable exercise to the minds of
various belligerent Governments, and the
great news agencies have found it worth
while to invent all sorts of false reports
about it, as I have said. Futile as talk seems,
the way it is dreaded shows that it does
have its effect. Ideas seem so unreal, so
powerless, before the vast physical force of
the military masses to-day; it is easy to
forget that it is only ideas that created that
force and that keep it in action. Let war
once be disbelieved in, and that force melts
into nothing.

Certainly the Congress has made its
contribution to the beginning of a piece of

JOURNEY AND IMPRESSIONS 19

long, serious, enthusiastic work which is to
be done in every country and all the time;
the work of "changing the mind of Europe/'
as Professor Schevill says, of creating and
making general the state of mind which does
not desire to profit at the expense of other
peoples, which desires to decide difficulties
by reason and not by force, and which re-
places national and social prejudices by
mutual goodwill and understanding. This
attitude will express itself in opposition to
armaments (by sea or land) and in a patient
readiness to wait for the righting of wrongs
by agreement.

In the distress of mind that the war
breeds in every thinking and feeling person,
there is a poignant relief in finding a channel
through which to work for peace. The
rehabilitating the wounded that they may
rise and go to the front again, all that co-
operates with the mutual destruction of
war, absorbs energy and expresses sympathy,
but it is not the work that many of us long to
find a way to do. In writing and making
available our forces, — our pennies, our time,
our reading hours, our intelligences, our

20 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

sympathies — we can cooperate toward
peace, longing for which, as Lowell said,

"our spirits wilt
Like shipwrecked men's on rafts for water."

It is important to have a great reservoir of
spiritual and intellectual energy, to have
ramifications in every village and club
and church, so that when the word goes out,
"This is to be done now," we can all line
up behind our leaders and act in unison in
all the countries of the war-racked world.
Study clubs and peace forums and subscrip-
tions and keeping oneself informed are
humdrum matters, yet they too are hitched
to a star, the star of hope in human destiny
beyond the war clouds.

The Hague is such a preeminently civilized
city — so tidy, so clean, so safe, so pleasant,
so pretty. Man has done such wonders in
subduing nature, in creating a world in the
image of his own desires, a background for
happy human living; and in every city in
Europe essentially the same conditions exist
for people substantially the same. In real-
ity Europe is already, in normal times,

JOURNEY AND IMPRESSIONS 21

one single society. Yet perfectly artificial
national boundaries are made to signify
collective greeds and hatreds, and only a
few miles off the fields are permanently
ruined, and the countryside is poisoned with
corpses, and all the decent thrifty little homes
are smashed to dust, and the irreplaceable
beauties of the cities are destroyed, and
living, thinking men are deliberately
killing one another. The soldiers in the
hospitals say to their nurses: "We don't
know why we are fighting. Can't you
women help us ? We can't do anything."
That is the very question we are trying to
answer.

CHAPTER II

AT THE WAR CAPITALS
ALICE HAMILTON

THE delegations to the war capitals con-
sisted of the president and vice-president of
the Congress, Miss Addams of Chicago and
Dr. Jacobs of Amsterdam. Frau Wollften
Palthe of The Hague and myself, who ac-
companied them, were not official members of
the delegation and usually took no part in
the formal interviews with ministers of
foreign affairs or chancellors; so that my
account of our wanderings must be con-
fined to the unofficial parts, to the people
we met informally and the impressions we
gained as we passed through the countries
and stopped in the capitals and saw the life
there.

There were absolutely no hardships en-
countered anywhere, not even real dis-
comforts. Inconveniences there were in the

22

AT THE WAR CAPITALS 23

shape of tiresome waiting in consular offices
for passports, — a formality which had to
be repeated between each two countries;
but aside from that, travel was easy and
comfortable. The first Government visited
by the delegation was the Dutch, since the
Congress was held at The Hague, and after
that came Great Britain, where the delega-
tion saw the minister of foreign affairs and
other officials. During that week I was in
Belgium, so that the experiences in London
given later in this chapter were crowded into
the week we spent there while waiting for
our return steamer to America.

The beginning of our joint pilgrimage was
on May 19, when with the two Dutch women
we left Amsterdam for the day's journey to
Berlin. Germany looked far more natural
than we had been led to expect; indeed,
the only unusual feature to my eyes was the
absence of young and middle-aged men in the
fields, where the work was being carried on
almost entirely by women, children, and old
men.

We reached Berlin at night and the next
morning as we drank our coffee a card was

24 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

brought up of a prominent Socialist, a mem-
ber of the Reichstag and an authority on
city planning, who visited this country some
two years ago and spoke in many of our
large cities. We went down to meet him, but
seeing no one in the room except a few
officers, thought there was some mistake;
when, to our surprise, a tall, blond soldier
came up and saluted and we recognized that
this was he. We had never supposed that
he would actually be in the army, though we
knew that he was one of the military Social-
ists, — indeed, one of those selected by the
Kaiser to go on a mission to Italy and try to
persuade the Italian Socialists that Italy
should remain loyal to the Triple Alliance.

We talked together and he told us of
Italy's probable entrance into the war, in-
sisting that it would be a matter of no mili-
tary importance, but an act of unforgivable
treachery. He had been up all the night
before at the foreign office and his eyes had
that dull hunted look that goes with sleep-
lessness and intense emotion. He was the
first one to attack us on the subject of
America's sale of munitions of war to the

AT THE WAR CAPITALS 25

allies, an attack to which we became wearily
accustomed before we left Germany and
Austria. He was just back from nine days
at the front and claimed that every shell
which had fallen in that part of the line while
he was there was an American shell. Never-
theless, he was most friendly and readily
promised to do what he could to secure an
interview for the delegation with the foreign
office.

After he left, I went out on a few errands
and got my first impression of Berlin. The
city, of course, was in perfect order, yet the
war met me on all sides. The walls were
placarded and the windows full of appeals
for money for all sorts of objects; for
blinded soldiers, for the relief of the widows
of the heroes of a certain battle, for a woman's
fund to be made up of pennies and presented
to the Kaiser, and — much the most terrible
of all — long lists of the latest casualties.
But there were no wounded soldiers to be
seen and no evidence of poverty and suffer-
ing, the relief work is apparently well done.
Later on, when we were taken around by one
of the leading philanthropists of Berlin we

26 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

saw how work has been provided for those
who need it, for the women especially. I
had a curious sensation on that expedition
of having seen and heard it all before ; and
then I remembered that just a little while
ago in Brussels I had seen gentle Belgian
ladies organizing work for the Belgian poor
in exactly the same way as these gentle
German ladies were doing it for the Gerrnan
poor. Both in Paris and in London it was
the same.

We had been told before we went to Ger-
many that the people were absolutely united
in a determination to fight until Germany
was victorious, that there were not a dozen
men the length and breadth of the land who
were even thinking, much less talking, of
peace.

Of course, such unanimity is inconceivable
in a nation of sixty-five million thinking
people, and it was easy enough for us to
convince ourselves that it did not exist.
From the first we met men and women who
were pacifists. The one who stands out
most prominently in my mind is the clergy-
man, who has gathered around him a group

AT THE WAR CAPITALS 27

of people free from bitterness and from ultra-
patriotism, fair-minded, and deeply sorrowful
over the war. Many of them belong also
to a group that calls itself Der Bund Neues
Vaterland) which stands for very much the
same things as the Union of Democratic
Control in England, — that is, for a peace
without injustice or humiliating terms to
any people, no matter who is victor.

Of course we also met people who held the
point of view which we in America have
been led to think universal in Germany. The
Lusitania was still in every one's mind and
the first note from America had just been
received. I talked to many people who
accepted the sinking of the vessel without
questioning. She was carrying ammunition,
she was armed, the passengers 'had been
warned and had no more reason to complain
than if they had deliberately entered a city
that was being besieged. For instance at a
tea one afternoon a lady of much sweetness
and intelligence described how her three
little girls had each adopted a convalescent
soldier, and how they saved their pennies to
buy tobacco for their proteges and gave

28 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

them one of their three daily slices of bread.
Then the lady continued in exactly the
same tone : "And the day the news came of
the sinking of the Lusitania we all took a
holiday. There were no lessons, and we
sent for our soldiers, and all went off for a
picnic in the country." These people were
absolutely sure that Germany was fighting
in self-defence, and toward the invasion of
Belgium most of them held the belief that it
had been a military necessity, but that there
must be no permanent occupation. No one
believed in the tales of atrocities. "If you
knew our good German soldiers, you would
see how impossible all that is."

As for our selling munitions of war to the
allies, the resentment it arouses is almost
incredible. Many of them seem to suppose
that all the ammunition used by the allies
comes from America. The American wife
of a German nobleman told us that a widowed
friend had come to see her with a bit of
shell which some soldier had sent her from
the front, saying it was the shell that had
killed her husband. And the woman had
shown her the ghastly thing, and said,

AT THE WAR CAPITALS 29

"Look at it and tell me if it is an American
shell."

We stood up stoutly for our country,
arguing that it was Germany which had
prevented both Hague Congresses from pro-
nouncing against this very practice, that
Germany had herself invariably taken every
opportunity to sell munitions to warring
countries, that for us to change international
law and custom in the middle of the present
war in favor of Germany and to the detri-
ment of the allies would be an unneutral
act, but it was mostly useless. I think we
convinced, perhaps, two or three men. Most
of them did not even listen to our explanation.

There was no difficulty in securing an
interview for the delegation with the minister
of foreign affairs. During the interview
with the chancellor I waited in a spacious
room in the chancellery on the Wilhelm
Strasse, looking out on a great shady garden
right in the heart of Berlin. From there we
went to pay some calls on men who we
thought might throw some light on the
question of the possibility of neutral nations
acting as negotiators between the warring

30 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

countries. It was very easy to secure the
introductions we wanted, partly through
German friends and partly through some
American newspaper men.

We called first on a learned professor who
did not seem to me either wise or just, and
his idea of the sort of intervention which
would be of value in this crisis was so utterly
un-American that we thought it hardly
worth listening to. Briefly, he advised that
President Wilson should use threats to the
two chief belligerents and thus bring them
to terms. "Let him," he said, "tell Eng-
land that he will place an embargo on muni-
tions of war, unless she will accept reasonable
terms for ending the war, and let him tell
Germany that this embargo will be lifted
unless Germany does the same."

Miss Addams told him that such a move
would be impossible, even if it were of any
value : that for the President to use threats
would be to lose his moral force, and that he
would not have the country behind him. But
the professor waved aside as absurd both
these objections. "Moral influence is noth-
ing," he said. "What is needed is armed

AT THE WAR CAPITALS 31

mediation. Your President has the right
under your constitution to do this ; he need
not consult the country."

He went on to say much that he had
already said in print ; that Germany desires
no new territory in Europe, but what she
requires is colonies, and that he would be in
favor of her evacuating Belgium on condition
of her being given concessions in the Belgian
Congo. He was one of the Germans who
could see no argument in defence of our sale
of munitions and who considered the sinking
of the Lusitania absolutely justified. As we
rose to go he said suddenly, "We learned
yesterday, my wife and I, of the fourteenth
of our near relatives who have died in this
war." He sighed heavily — "There are
others of course who are wounded and ill."

We found the most famous journalist of
Germany very interesting. He is a little
man with a big head, almost all of it fore-
head and hair, his eyes tired and burnt-out
and his general aspect full of weary depres-
sion. People had warned us against him,
calling him a fire-eater, one of the men who
had done most to encourage the war. To us

32 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

he seemed quite the contrary; he seemed to
regard it as a terrible tragedy. He was very
fair to our country, saying that Germany had
no right to criticise our sale of ammunition
to the allies. He said he had always told the
Germans that since they had a great advan-
tage in their enormous factories at Essen,
England naturally must strive to offset it
by an equal advantage, and this she had in
her navy, which enabled her to buy the sup-
plies she could not manufacture. He said
it was poor sportsmanship for Germany to
protest. As for help from the neutral
nations in this crisis, he seemed to think it the
only hope, and yet not an immediate hope.

The most moving and impressive inter-
views I recall in Germany were first one with
a young German soldier full of a sick horror
of war, the other with a former Government
official in Berlin, whom we went to see just
after our conversation with the journalist.
This man had known and loved England and
he had believed that the two countries had
come to understand each other much better
during the last few years and that he had
helped to bring this about. Then came

AT THE WAR CAPITALS 33

those terrible days in July and he had
struggled against the men who were making
the war, but he had gone down to defeat seeing
all he had worked for vanish in a week when
his beloved country determined on a course
which to him could seem only a hideous
blunder. He was so wretched that as he
talked to us he would every now and then
drop his head in his hands and fall into
silence, then suddenly look up and say :
"You know I am no longer in the Govern-
ment, I am discredited, suspected, an out-
cast," or, "They may say what they will, I
know England was not plotting war/'
Of the Lusitania he said, "A terrible mis-
take." He listened eagerly to Miss Addams
as she explained what the Peace Congress
was urging, but at the end he shook his head ;
he could see no hope anywhere. And so we
left him in his great, sombre library, a hope-
less figure in deep mourning, stooping as he
walked, torn continually with a racking
cough, his cheeks and temples hollow, and
his eyes sunken. We felt that he was in
very truth a victim of the war, though he had
never been in the trenches.

34 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

I can remember but two Germans who
spoke to me with the sort of bitterness that
I have heard from German-Americans over
here, even though the war is so very close to
them. I suspect that that is the real reason :
that the tragedy is too great for rancor and
uncharitableness. One woman said to me,
when I quoted something from this side of
the water: "I am far past all that now. At
first I was bitter, but that is gone now. I
have almost forgotten it." One must always
remember that most Germans read nothing
and hear nothing from the outside. I
talked with an old friend, the wife of a pro-
fessor under whom I worked years ago when
I was studying bacteriology in Germany.
She and her husband are people with cosmo-
politan connections, they read three lan-
guages besides their own, and have always
been as far removed as possible from narrow
provincialism, but since last July they have
known nothing except what their Govern-
ment has decided that they shall know. I
did not argue with my friend, but, of course,
we talked much together and after she had
been with us for three days she told me that

AT THE WAR CAPITALS 35

she had never known before that there were
people in England who did not wish to crush
Germany, who wished for a just settlement,
and even some who were opposed to the
war.

Then she said : "I want you to believe this.
We Germans think that the Fatherland was
attacked without provocation, that our war
is one of self-defence only. That is what
we have been told. I begin to think it may
not be true, but you must believe that we
were sincere in our conviction."

In Berlin we had bread cards and we ate
war bread. At each meal the waiter asked
for our cards and snipped off one of the three
coupons, then he brought us one and a half
Brodchen, quite enough for breakfast and
more than enough for the other meals. It
was good bread — something like a cross
between rye and white bread. They told
us that this excessive economy was not
really necessary, for as a matter of fact,
Germany gets all the wheat she needs across
the Russian border by bribing officials, but
that the German Government wished to
train the people in habits of saving. It

36 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

has certainly been successful. I could not
imagine being wasteful of bread in Berlin.

In Vienna, however, the bread cards
seemed a real necessity, for the allowance
of bread was very small, and as in Berlin, if
one did not eat the three portions on a
Monday, one could not save the coupon and
get four on Tuesday. The slice given us
three times a day was only two and a half
inches long, two inches wide, and three-
quarters of an inch thick, a pitifully small
allowance for working people, to whom bread
is the chief article of diet. It was a heavy,
unappetizing bread, made of a mixture of
potato flour, corn-meal, rye, and a very little
wheat. The Viennese spoke with bitterness of
the scarcity of wheat in Austria, saying that
the Hungarians had plenty, but they were
selling it to Prussia instead of to Austria.

In every country that we visited, people
would ask us with pathetic eagerness if we
did not find everything just the same as
usual, if the city was not as gay as ever, life
going on just the same, no sign of war any-
where. It would be a superficial person
who could say that even of Berlin, and no

AT THE WAR CAPITALS 37

one could say it of Vienna. We did not
think that the people in Vienna had enough
to eat ; they looked, many of them, starved,
more so than any people I have ever seen, —
except, of course, in East London, where
starvation seems endemic in normal times.
I went one morning into the great Stephans-
kirche. No service was going on, but the
church was full of people kneeling at every
altar, one group of two hundred gathered
together and chanting a litany quite without
any leader, just by themselves. They were
tragic-looking people, many of them the
poorest of the poor. Among them were
young recruits and wounded soldiers — the
saddest congregation I have ever seen.
Everywhere there are convalescent soldiers
hobbling along the street, or wheeled in
chairs, for the hospitals are scattered all
over Vienna. The horses were so thin that
one could count their ribs ; we did not see one
horse in decent condition while we were there.
To add to the general impression of poverty,
the walls and windows were covered with
urgent appeals to the people to do their duty
and subscribe to the second war loan.

38 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

We reached Vienna on the evening of
Whitsunday. Italy had just declared war.
That evening there was an attempt at a
demonstration on the street under our
balcony but it was not very warlike, just
a crowd of young boys and girls singing the
Austrian national hymn. The next day we
passed a great troop of soldiers starting for
the frontier. They were young fellows, al-
most all of them, some mere lads. They
were very gay and proud and confident, and
had bunches of flowers stuck in their belts
and in their caps and even in the muzzles of
their guns. That is really the most tragic
thing one sees — the young men setting off
gaily and confidently for the war. The
wounded soldiers are bad enough, but at
least they have come through alive.

In addition to seeing the minister of foreign
affairs, and the prime minister of Austria
— which was the real object of the visit to
Vienna of course, we had also, as in Berlin,
informal interviews with pacifists and others
who were eager to hear what the committee
had done and hoped to do. I remember
meeting a very lovely woman who had gone to

AT THE WAR CAPITALS 39

the Hague Congress simply because she
felt that if in any country women were
getting together to talk of peace, she must
go and meet them. She was not a member
of any woman's club and she had never
spoken in public before, but she made one
of the most moving speeches of the Congress.
When I met her in Vienna, she told me that
she had, since the first, been closely con-
nected with the American Red Cross Hospital
in Vienna, and that she had never heard a
soldier speak with hatred or contempt of
the men on the other side. That, she said,
belonged to the non-fighters at home.

It was in Vienna that we heard the strong-
est protests against the censorship of the
press. The meeting held there for the dele-
gation was small and rather timid, yet it
was a comfort to know that there was a
group of women who had courage and broad-
mindedness enough to come together and
ask to be told about the Peace Congress.
Among our visitors was an old friend who is
connected with shipping interests in Trieste
and who was very indignant over the en-
trance of Italy into the war. He spoke of

40 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

the unfounded claims of the Irredentists,
saying that though Trieste is predominantly
Italian, the hinterland which it serves is
Slavic, and the Dalmatian coast has only a
small minority of Italians.

There had been a question of our going to
Budapest. Hungary has, of course, no
separate minister of foreign affairs, nor can
she declare war or peace independently of
Austria. But Hungarians do not consider
themselves Austrians, and their present
prime minister is generally said to be the
most influential man at present in the Em-
pire Kingdom. Moreover, the suffrage party
in Budapest had endorsed the Peace Congress
and the women were eager to have a large
public meeting there. Finally it was de-
cided that the two Dutch ladies should go
on to Berne to attend a peace meeting there
and that the two Americans should go to
Budapest.

Our short time there was crowded to over-
flowing. From the outset it seemed to me
quite different from either Berlin or Vienna
and curiously like our own country, in spite
of the Magyar which one heard everywhere.

AT THE WAR CAPITALS 41

Our first breakfast seemed like home, be-
cause there was plenty of bread and no bother
about bread cards and before it was over a
group of journalists had arrived who were
not only as eager for news as American
journalists would be, but apparently as in-
dependent in their use of it. We were
quickly taken in charge by a group of very
able women who arranged for an interview
with the prime minister and for a large public
meeting. Miss Addams' speech was repeated
in Magyar but I think fully two-thirds of the
audience understood English and were most
responsive and sympathetic. When it was
over, there was a dinner for about sixty at
the Ritz Hotel and it seemed characteristic
of the spirit of the country that a dignitary
of the Roman Catholic Church, a pacifist
and also an outspoken feminist, should pre-
side. There were members of parliament
and Government officials present, but the
discussion at the table was apparently as
free and unconstrained as it would be in
America. The man who sat on my left was
a privy councillor, who told me frankly that
he was a pacifist, that he had no use for

42 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

Prussia, that he considered that Hungary
had no quarrel with Servia, certainly no
desire to hurt Belgium, and that she was
being forced to fight Prussia's war. The
woman on my right told me that she and
her husband have put up convalescent homes
for some twelve hundred soldiers on their
estate; but she herself stays in Budapest
and is chief cook, as she called it, for a
hospital with five hundred men. She has
charge of all the supplies and must plan the
dietary so that she comes within the allow-
ance made by the Government, yet she
must give her soldiers enough nourishing
food. If there is a deficit, it comes out of
her pocket.

She told me that the English were generally
liked in Hungary and that the people of
Budapest are very proud of the fact that
when the war broke out they had over five
hundred English people in the city, and they
have interned only about a dozen; the rest
are all at liberty. We found also a very
kindly feeling toward the Russians with
whom, of course, the Hungarians have come
in especially close contact. They say that

AT THE WAR CAPITALS 43

fighting them is like fighting children, for
the Russian peasant is averse to war and
often has to be absolutely forced into it.

They told us the story of two Hungarians
who had captured ten Russians, and one of
the latter said, "Wait a minute and I will
bring you some more." They let him go on
the chance, thinking that anyway they had
nine prisoners left, and presently he re-
turned bringing with him thirty other Rus-
sians who willingly laid down their arms.
They said, "We never wished to fight but
now it is spring it is the season to till the
soil; we will not fight any more; we wish
to till the soil as we always do." So they
have been put to work in the fields and are
quite content.

In Budapest I was much impressed by my
first experience of an official palace with
many antechambers and men who, I felt
sure, must be what historical novels call
"lackeys." The prime minister looks curi-
ously like pictures of General Grant, only
that he is very tall and broad-shouldered.
Like many Hungarians, he is a Presbyterian.
He impresses one as a rather sombre, stern

44 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

man with great resolution, but not as the
fire-eater, the fierce war-lord, that the
Austrians had described to us; certainly to
us he said nothing of the glories or gains of
war, only of its senseless horrors.

On our journey from Berne to Rome we
stopped at Milan and at once were brought
face to face with Italy in war paint, for the
streets were decked with the flags of the
five allies and placarded with posters read-
ing " Vogliamo Salandra." In the great
arcade some of the shops had been wrecked
by the mob. They told us that the city was
at the time under martial law. The Duomo
had been protected against possible Zeppelin
raids by covering all the gilded portions of
the roof with scaffolding and sandbags. It
would never be difficult in Milan to stir up
old animosity against the Austrians, but
among the devices used to extend this to the
Germans we saw conspicuously displayed in
the shop windows large photographs of a
Belgian child with one hand cut off. This
indubitable evidence of German atrocity was
held second only to the fiery speeches of
D'Annuncio as an aid in securing the proper

AT THE WAR CAPITALS 45

war spirit among the Italians. It was evi-
dent from the photograph itself that the
little hand had been carefully amputated,
but such trifling evidence was of course not
considered — and the old war story of
mutilated children, utilized for hundreds of
years in various countries, once more did
its work.

Rome was at its loveliest, for the rains had
kept a vivid spring green everywhere, but
it was deserted as far as foreigners were
concerned. Our hotel could serve us only
our breakfast coffee and rolls, for cooks and
waiters had been mobilized. Outwardly,
the city was very gay. Constitution Day
was celebrated while we were there, and the
streets were filled with enormous crowds of
holiday people and of soldiers in fresh
uniforms, and flags were flying everywhere.
The feeling seemed to be that the war could
not possibly last long; now that Italy was
in, it would soon be decided. Coming as we
had from the sight of what nine months of
war means to even so wonderfully organized
a country as Germany, it filled us with dread
to think what Rome would be like after a

46 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

few months were over and she to6 had her
cripples and her blinded men and widows and
orphans and starving refugees.

It seemed little more than a formality to
present the resolutions of the Peace Congress
to ministers who had just triumphantly led
Italy into war, but of course this was done.
Afterwards we presented our letter from the
Primate of Hungary to Cardinal Gasparri,
secretary of state to the Pope, and through
him secured an audience with the Pope
himself. It was a real audience, for we sat
for half an hour and discussed with him the
war and the possibility of some action on the
part of neutral nations to initiate negoti-
ations between the warring countries. He
was in favor of this, and said more than once
that it was for the United States, the greatest
of neutral countries, to make a move in which
he would gladly cooperate if it seemed
best.

We had had warning about the opposition
the delegation would meet with in all of
these countries, but especially had we been
warned about France. It was true that
though we found pacifists even in Paris, still

AT THE WAR CAPITALS 47

the feeling there was on the whole more
grimly determined, more immovable, than
anywhere else. One can understand why
this is so. France has been invaded, the
richest part of her country is still in the hands
of the conqueror, and her feeling is one of
bitter resentment. It seemed to me also
that we in America had never realized how
universal has been the dread of just this dis-
aster in the French mind. Over and over
again I heard people say: "It does not
matter what we have to endure if only we
can at last free France from the nightmare
of a German invasion."

No French woman had come to the Con-
gress at The Hague, and a group of leading
women had sent a protest against the hold-
ing of such a Congress. We had rather
dreaded meeting in Paris even those women
whom we knew, yet when we did meet a group
of them, the delegation was able to make
them see how the women at the Congress had
felt and they on their side made us see that
their bitterness was understandable, even
if we could not share it. The war is terribly
close to these women. Every one I met that

48 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

afternoon had at least one near and dear
relative in danger at the front or already lost.
They were all engaged in relief work of some
kind, most of them spending their whole
day at it, for that is the only thing that makes
life bearable.

There is however a little band of pacifist
women, most of them young, which has
formed recently and is increasing all the
time. There are also men in France who are
willing to speak very frankly against pro-
longing the war to the bitter end. One of
the members of the Chamber of Deputies
introduced us to other like-minded members
of the chamber, a goodly company. The
news of Mr. Bryan's resignation had just
come, and since the second note to Germany
had not yet been published, every one was
feeling a bit apprehensive as to America's
probable course of action. The deputies
who talked to us all hoped that we would
keep out of the war, for they said that the
world needed a great neutral nation, not
only to take charge of the embassies of the
warring countries, to look after the welfare
of prisoners of war, and to feed Belgium, but

AT THE WAR CAPITALS 49

especially to help in the final settlement of the
terms of peace.

In Paris, I had the impression even more
strongly than elsewhere that the most ex-
travagantly bitter statements are made, not
by the Europeans themselves, but by the
American sojourners in Europe. There is
something very distasteful in this. It seems
to me that no one has a right to urge extreme
sacrifices unless he is also sacrificing himself,
that nobody should talk of war to the bitter
end who is not himself fighting. I remember
how irritated I was by an American author,
who lounged comfortably in the court of the
hotel, smoking innumerable cigarettes, and
nobly declaring his readiness to sacrifice the
last Frenchmen in the trenches before he
would yield an inch to Germany ! Nor can
I forget an American nurse who displayed
with pride a ghoulish collection she had made
of German and Austrian helmets, knapsacks,
fragments of uniforms, bayonet ends, tro-
phies of French battlefields, which she had
bought from returned soldiers.

Of the ministers whom the delegation inter-
viewed in Paris, the minister of foreign affairs,

50 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

a life-long militarist, was less approachable
than most of the ministers whom the dele-
gations met, although the president of the
Conseil who performs the offices of a prime
minister was much more moderate than he.

The informal interviews were sometimes
depressing, sometimes quite inspiring. Per-
haps the most depressing were those with
former pacifists, who in bitter disillusion-
ment over the failure of their hopes and in
mortification over the ridicule they had
received, had become almost more militaristic
than the military.

Poor little Belgium has had to accept the
hospitality of France and her Government is
housed in hotels and villas on the seashore
near Havre. The Belgian minister for foreign
affairs was a sad, gentle person, who took the
mission of the delegation very seriously and
spoke with real feeling of Belgium's longing
for peace, although, as he said, she was in
the hands of her allies and must leave such
things to them.

With this visit the work of the delegation
was over until the resolutions could be
presented to Washington. As, however, we

AT THE WAR CAPITALS 51

were to sail from Liverpool, we had a week to
spend in London, and put it to very good
use. London seemed to me more changed by
the war than any city except Vienna, partly
because the sight of soldiers in London is
unusual, and because what seemed natural in
Berlin was unnatural there. Then, too, there
are posters covering every available space
and appealing to all possible motives which
might induce men to join the army.

It was a relief to reach a country where
speech is free and where critics of the Gov-
ernment can make themselves heard in
Hyde Park, or in pamphlets such as those
issued by the Union for Democratic Control.
Our days were filled with meetings, formal
and informal, interviews arranged by the
very capable British committee. We met in
England a large number of men and women
who recognized England's responsibility in
the remoter causes of the war and who are
determined to do their utmost to bring about
a permanent peace on the basis of justice
and human needs rather than on that of
political ambitions. To many of these even
the invasion of Belgium did not justify a

52 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

return to the outworn ways of violence.
Some of these, as one would expect, were
Quakers who seemed to us to be playing a
very fine part just now in England. They
have remained surprisingly faithful to their
principles and while serving their country in
ways which expose them to great danger, they
will do only those things that tend to pre-
serve life not to destroy it. We dined with
a Quaker family the three children of which
had gone to the war. The eldest son is
doing ambulance work in Flanders, carry-
ing the wounded from the battlefield to the
base hospital, than which no work is more
perilous ; the second son is engaged in sweep-
ing mines in the North Sea; and his sister
nurses in a hospital in Dunkirk, which has
repeatedly been shelled.

Oxford was very sad, but we were told
that during term time the contrast with the
Oxford one used to know was even greater.
As we walked through the colleges, our hosts
would point out the new kind of honor list
hanging on the wall of chapel or cloister, the
list of students who have already fallen in
the war, and they would tell us of this one

AT THE WAR CAPITALS 53

or that, of his great promise or his charming
qualities, so that the names took on a reality
even to us. As I remember it, St. John's has
been converted into a school for refugee Bel-
gian boys, Balliol was filled with the officers
of the training camps, other colleges with
young recruits. Then there are the big hos-
pitals under Sir William Osier, one of them
devoted entirely to men who have breathed
the poisonous gases and yet survived.

In England, more than in any country, we
heard of doubts and questionings on the
part of the young men, especially those from
the universities, who cannot reconcile the
thought of killing other men with what they
have always held as their ideal of conduct,
and yet who cannot refuse to respond to
their country's call.

It is hard to sum up general impressions
from this journey, there are so many of them.
One, however, I should like to speak of, for
it is borne in upon me so strongly now that
I am at home again. That is, that there is
in the countries actually at war no such uni-
versal desire to fight on to the bitter end as
we suppose over here. We judge largely by

54 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

the newspapers which come to us from that
side and which are of course strictly censored.

I find that people here are often indignant,
if not actually resentful, at the mere sugges-
tion that negotiations be substituted for force
at the earliest possible moment. They seem
to be much impressed with the things that
must be gained by war before war can be
allowed to stop, but I believe this means
that they do not realize what war has already
cost the countries engaged in it and what
more it will cost if it is to continue. The
men at the head of affairs over there are not
blind and they do realize it, and so do many
thinking people in every country, and so
would Americans if they could see for them-
selves and were not obliged to form their
judgment simply on what the warring
Governments allow the newspapers to" say.
Those nations are committing race suicide
and impoverishing their children and grand-
children, and they know it, yet they seem
to be unable to find any way to end it.

They do not need us to encourage them to
keep on, but it may be that they need us to
help them to find a way out.

CHAPTER III

THE REVOLT AGAINST WAR
JANE ADDAMS

(a) By Certain Young Men

(b) By Groups of Civilians

THE details of our visits to the various war
capitals are given in the official report of
the Congress and for obvious reasons are
omitted from this narrative account. It
would also be most unwise to repeat our ex-
periences with any one Government, but
certain impressions received in all of the
capitals so unmistakably have to do with
war as an institution and with its reactions
on the civil population that no confidence
can be violated in stating them although
it is most difficult to formulate our ex-
perience, brought face to face as we were with
so much genuine emotion and high patriotism
as is exhibited in the warring nations of
Europe at the present moment. We became
55

56 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

very much afraid of generalizing ; the situa-
tion is so complicated and so many wild
statements are made in regard to it that it is
farthest from our purpose to add to this
already overwhelming confusion, or to "let
loose" any more emotion upon the world.
We came to feel that what is needed above all
else is some human interpretation of this
overevolved and much-talked-of situation
in which so much of the world finds itself in
dire confusion and bloodshed. In regard
to such generalizations as we do venture to
make, it is necessary to guard against one or
two possible misapprehensions. The dele-
gations from the Congress at The Hague
visited the ministry of each nation, who of
course represent the civil aspect of govern-
ment as it is carried on year after year
when there is no war. In every country,
we were received by a committee of women
connected officially with the Congress at
The Hague, who had arranged that we
should speak in public to larger or smaller
audiences, and in every country we naturally
met the friends of these women, the mothers
of men who were at the front, nurses in the

THE REVOLT AGAINST WAR 57

hospitals, and many others. We saw So-
cialists, aghast at the violence resulting to
their international views from the war but
already beginning to recover from the first
impact; groups of Christians or Jews whose
conceptions of religious solidarity had been
outraged. We came in touch with new
types of pacifist organizations, thrown up
by the war, taking the place of the old paci-
fists, who with few exceptions were sub-
merged by the flood-tide of militarism.

I came to believe that there must be many
more of the same type in every country,
quite as eager for the retention and develop-
ment of their national ideals and quite as
patriotic as the militarists, but believing
with all their hearts that militarism cannot
establish those causes which are most dear
to them, that human nature has been forced
into unnatural channels by the war and that
their children are being sacrificed for a pur-
pose which can never be obtained through
warfare. I do not wish to imply that in any
country we found open division between
the people. On the contrary we found
that the war had united men, women, and

58 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

children in a common cause and had bound
them together in an overwhelming national
consciousness.

Our first striking experience was to find that
the same causes and reasons for the war were
heard everywhere. Each belligerent nation
solemnly assured us that it was fighting under
the impulse of self-defence, to preserve its
traditions and ideals from those who would
come in to disturb and destroy them. And
in every capital we heard the identical
phrases describing the good qualities of the
citizens within the country, and very much
the same derogatory phrases in regard to
the enemy whom they were fighting. On
one point only they always differed and that
was in regard to the responsibility for the
war.

We always found some officials ready to
indict the entire situation. I have never
heard war indicted with more earnestness
than by responsible men in the belligerent
nations. Of course they all deprecated the
loss of the youth upon whom depended the
progress of the nation and the tremendous
debts fastened upon the backs of the humble

THE REVOLT AGAINST WAR 59

people. On the other hand, they were all
of the opinion that this war was inevitable,
and in the end would make for progress.

The warring nations presented another
point of similarity; from many people
whom we met in each of them we were
forced to infer that a certain type of young
man did not want the war and considered
the older men responsible for it, that enthu-
siasm for the war was not as universal
among the young men who were doing the
fighting as it was among the elderly men
established in the high places of church and
state; that it was the older men who had
convinced themselves that this was a right-
eous war which must be fought to a finish ;
that there were to be found in each nation
young men in the trenches convinced that
war was not a legitimate method of settling
international difficulties.

Doubtless this is but a partial view. I
am quite sure that the large majority of
young men in the trenches are confident that
they are performing the highest possible
duty; that the spirit of righteousness is in
the hearts of most of them, but I am also

60 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

convinced that there are to be found these
other men who are doing violence to the
highest teachings which they know.

It seemed to me at moments as if the differ-
ence between the older generation and the
new is something we apprehend dimly in
each country; that the older men believed
more in abstractions, that certain theologi-
cal or nationalistic words, patriotic phrases
included, meant more to them than they did
to young men who had come to take life as
it was revealed through experience, who were
more pragmatic in their philosophy, who
were more empirical in their point of
view.

Certain young men in England contended
that the older men, surviving as a product of
the Victorian age, responded to slogans which
had not the same meaning in the ears of this
generation, that an intense narrow patriotism
was one of them ; that the older men were
nearer to the type that had been ready to
fight for religious abstraction, nearer to the
age when men lined up in opposing forces
to fight out a difference in dogma as to the
composition of the Trinity; and that the

THE REVOLT AGAINST WAR 6l

government all sts have reared new abstrac-
tions. It is this feeling that causes the pro-
test among the young men, who are still
asking new experiences, new contacts with
other nations, new reactions to the intelli-
gence of other hemispheres. These young
men at the outbreak of the war were just
beginning to make themselves felt, they
were responding to the promptings toward
a new order which might in the end have
done away with standing armies and camps.
At the present moment they feel themselves
violently thrown back and bidden play a
role in a drama of life which they were out-
growing. Such young men have no notion
of shirking their duty, of not standing up to
the war at their country's demand, but they
go into the trenches with a divided mind which
is tragic. Tragedy after all is not a conflict
between good and evil; tragedy from the
time of ^Eschylus has been the conflict be-
tween one good and another, between two
kinds of good, so that the mind of the victim
is torn as to which he ought to follow, which
should possess his entire allegiance. That
sort of tragedy, I am sure, is in the minds

62 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

of certain young men who are fighting upon
every side of the great conflict.

Even in their conception of internation-
alism, the two groups of young men and
old men differed widely. The Victorian
group, for instance, in their moral roman-
ticism, fostered a sentiment for a far-off
"Federation of the World," and believed
that the world would be federated when
wise men from many nations met together
and accomplished it. The young men do
not talk much about internationalism, but
they live in a world where common
experience has in fact become largely in-
ternationalized. A young Frenchman, em-
ployed in the Parisian office of a large busi-
ness enterprise, told me that the day war
was declared he went out of the door with
an Englishman and a German with whom he
had been associated for four years. The
three men shook hands in front of the locked
door and each man went to fight for his
country, but the two said to the third : "We
hope never to be brought up against you in
the line of battle." They had no theory
about loving each other, but in point of fact

THE REVOLT AGAINST WAR 63

a genuine friendship had transcended na-
tional bounds. The men of the older genera-
tion have not shared so largely in such ex-
periences which the new internationalism
implies, nor in their devotion to abstract
ideas are they so open to modification through
experience.

The young men therefore, when bidden to
go to war on a purely national issue, have a
tendency to question whether that which
they are doing is useful and justifiable and
are inclined to more or less test it out. Such
testing is indeed in line with their philos-
ophy, for while empirically grounded truths
do not inspire such violent loyalty as a priori
truths, they "are more discussable and have
a human and social quality," we are told.

This notion that the old gulf between
fathers and sons is once more yawning wide
in Europe may be a superficial one, but I
am at least recording the impression we
received in one country after the other.
Doubtless at the beginning of the war, the
young men even more enthusiastically than
the old were caught up into that conscious-
ness of a strong and united nation which

64 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

has carried its citizens to heights of self-
sacrifice which human nature seldom attains,
and they all responded to that primitive
ethic founded upon obedience to group senti-
ment and the need of race safety which so
completely asserted its sway over that more
highly developed ethic supposed to be the
possession of the civilized world. But just
as there is a gradual return on the part of
the Socialists, for instance, to those doctrines
of internationalism and peace which they
have preached for half a century, so thou-
sands of other citizens are going back to the
moral positions they held before the war.
The young are perhaps the most eager to
make clear their changing position; they
continue to salute the flag, but recognize it
as a symbol and realize that it has the danger
of all abstractions, that a wrong content
may be substituted for the right one, and
that men in a nation, an army, a crowd may
do things horrible as well as heroic that
they could never do alone.

The older men have no conception of the
extent to which the purely nationalistic
appeal has been weakened. They them-

THE REVOLT AGAINST WAR 65

selves say that this war with its sturdy
nationalistic ideals and ambitions shows
what nonsense all the talk of internationalism
has been and how absurd were the Hague
Conferences, although in the very same
speech I heard an Englishman say also that
Great Britain went into war to protest against
the illegal and unjustifiable invasion of
Belgium because solemn international treaties
had been broken, admitting that inter-
national obligations are so genuine that blood
must be spilled to preserve them.

The young men on the contrary speak
with no uncertain sound. We met one
young German who said : "I happen to
live near the line of Schleswig-Holstein. I
am told the men of Schleswig-Holstein are
my brothers, but my grandfather before me
fought them. I do not know whether they
are my brothers or my grandfather's enemies ;
I only know I have no feeling for them
different from that I have for men living
farther north in Denmark itself. The truth
is that neither to my grandfather nor to me
do the people of Schleswig-Holstein mean
anything; that he hated them and that I

66 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

love them are both fictions, invented and
fostered for their own purposes by the people
who have an interest in war." The man who
said this was a fine young fellow who had
been wounded and sent home to be cured;
in those solemn days he was trying to think
the thing out and he asked himself what
it was he was doing with this life of his.
What impresses one in regard to these
young men is that it is so desperately irrev-
ocable, that it is their very lives which are
demanded. The older men who have had
honor and fulness of life and have been put
into high places in the state, who are they
to deprive even one of these young men of
that which should lie before him ?

It is obviously quite impossible to know how
many young men there are in a similar state
of mind, how many more mothers like the one
who said to us : "It was hard to see my boy go
because he did not believe in war ; he did not
belong to a generation that believes in war."

One of the leading men of Europe is
authority for the statement: "If this war
could have been postponed for ten years, —
perhaps," he said, "I will be safe and say,

THE REVOLT AGAINST WAR 67

twenty years, — war would have been im-
possible in Europe, because of the tremen-
dous revolt against it in the schools and the
universities."

Certainly we found such revolt in Eng-
land, to quote from a letter published in the
Cam-Magazine at Cambridge University and
written by a young man who had gone to
the front, joining that large number of stu-
dents who have almost depleted the univer-
sities.

"The greatest trial that this war has brought is
that it has released the old men from all restraining
influences, and has let them loose upon the world.
The city editors, the retired majors, the amazons, and
last, but I fear, not least, the venerable archdeacons,
have never been so free from contradiction. Just when
the younger generation was beginning to take its share
in the affairs of the world, and was hoping to counteract
the Victorian influences of the older generation, this
war has come to silence us, — permanently or tempo-
rarily as the case may be. Meanwhile, the old men are
having field days on their own. In our name, and for
our sakes, as they pathetically imagine, they are doing
their very utmost, it would seem, to perpetuate, by
their appeals to hate, intolerance, and revenge, those
very follies which have produced the present conflagra-
tion."

68 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

A professor in an English university showed
us a letter written in a military hospital by
one of his students, in which the young man
congratulated himself upon the loss of a
leg because it enabled him to resume reason-
able living with an undivided mind. He had
responded to his country's call in deference
to the opinion of older men. He would now
return to the ideas of his own generation.

A letter from one of those young ardent
spirits fighting in the opposing trenches
written to his fiancee runs as follows:

" I rouse my indignation and awaken all my powers
to put my thoughts in order, that, should I return from
this war, I might fling them once for all in the faces of
men who deceive themselves into finding a justification
for all this murdering; and who further believe —
Heaven knows why — that there will be great moral
effects from this wholesale slaughter. As if civilized
men were ever justified for any principle whatever, to
suddenly fall into the madness of letting loose on one
another with instruments of murder."

It gradually became clear to us that
whether it is easily recognized or not, there
has grown up a generation in Europe, as
there has doubtless grown up a generation

THE REVOLT AGAINST WAR 69

in America, who have revolted against war.
It is a god they know not of, whom they
are not willing to serve ; because all of their
sensibilities and their training upon which
their highest ideals depend, revolt against
it.

We met a young man in Switzerland who
had been in the trenches for three months
and had been wounded there. He did
not know that he had developed tuberculosis
but he thought he was being cured, and he
was speaking his mind before he went back
to the trenches. He was, I suppose, what
one would call a fine young man, but not an
exceptional one. He had been in business
with his father and had travelled in South
Africa, in France, England, and Holland.
He had come to know men as Mensch, that
gute Menschen were to be found in every
land. And now here he was, at twenty-
eight, facing death because he was quite
sure when he went back to the trenches that
death awaited him. He said that never
during that three months and a half had he
once shot his gun in a way that could possibly
hit another man and nothing in the world

70 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

could make him kill another man. He
could be ordered into the trenches and "to go
through the motions, " but the final act was
in his own hands and with his own con-
science. And he said: "My brother is an
officer." He gave the name and rank of
his brother, for he was quite too near the
issues of life and death for any shifting and
concealing. "He never shoots in a way that
will kill. And I know dozens and dozens
of young men who do not."

We talked with nurses in hospitals, with
convalescent soldiers, with mothers of those
who had been at home on furlough and had
gone back into the trenches, and we learned
that there are surprising numbers of young
men who will not do any fatal shooting be-
cause they think that no one has the right
to command them to take human life.
From one hospital we heard of five soldiers
who had been cured and were ready to be
sent back to the trenches, when they com-
mitted suicide, not because they were afraid
to die but they would not be put into a
position where they would have to kill
others.

THE REVOLT AGAINST WAR 71

I recall a spirited young man who said :
"We are told that we are fighting for civiliza-
tion but I tell you that war destroys civiliza-
tion. The highest product of the univer-
sities, the scholar, the philosopher, the poet,
when he is in the trenches, when he spends
his days and nights in squalor and brutality
and horror, is as low and brutal as the rudest
peasant. They say, those newspaper writers,
that it is wonderful to see the courage
of the men in the trenches, singing, joking,
playing cards, while the shells fall around
them. Courage there is no room for, just
as there is no room for cowardice. One
cannot rush to meet the enemy, one cannot
even see him. The shells fall here or they
fall there. If you are brave, you cannot defy
them ; if you are a coward, you cannot flee
from them ; it is all chance. You see the man
you were playing cards with a while ago lying
on the ground a bloody mass and you look
at him and think, 'Well, this time it took
him ; in a few minutes it may be my turn ;
let's go back to the cards.' And all the time
you loathe the squalor, the brutality, the
savages around you, and the savage you are

72 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

yourself becoming. Why should you kill
men who live in other countries, men whom
in times of peace you would like and respect ?
At least I can say that as yet I have escaped
the horror of killing any one."

It is such a state of mind which is respon-
sible for the high percentage of insanity
among the soldiers. In the trains for the
wounded there is often a closed van in which
are kept the men who have lost their minds.
Sometimes they recover after due care, and
sometimes they prove to be hopelessly in-
sane. A young Russian wrote home : "Men
have fought from the beginning of history,
yet no one has ever recorded that so many
soldiers lost their minds, were driven mad
by war. Do you suppose it was true always,
or is it only true in this generation ? "

In every country we heard of the loathing
against the use of the bayonet felt by this
type of young man to whom primitive war-
fare was especially abhorrent, although he
was a brave soldier and serving his country
with all his heart. We heard from interned
soldiers in Holland that they had escaped
across the border dazed and crazed after a

THE REVOLT AGAINST WAR 73

bayonet charge; from hospital nurses who
said that delirious soldiers are again and
again possessed by the same hallucination —
that they are in the act of pulling their
bayonets out of the bodies of men they have
killed; from the returned soldiers one of
whom said to us : "A bayonet charge does
not show courage, but madness. Men must
be brought to the point by stimulants and
once the charge is begun they are like insane
men. I have been in it and after it was over
I was utterly dazed. I did not know what
had happened to me any more than if I
had been picked up from the water after an
explosion on shipboard."

We were told in several countries that in
order to inhibit the sensibilities of this type
of man, stimulants were given to the soldiers
before a charge was ordered ; that the giving
of stimulants was a quicker process than
that incitement to reprisals and revenge
which in actual warfare often serves as an
immediate incentive. In illustration of such
substitution, a Frenchman said that "since
the use of poisonous gases by the Germans,
no further stimulants would be needed for a

74 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

thoroughly indignant and aroused soldiery";
an Englishman spoke of the difficulties in
the early months of the war in overcoming
the camaraderie unhappily evinced by certain
British troops for the Saxons long established
in an opposite trench, and the relief when
the Bavarians took their places, against
whom no incitement to hostility was nec-
essary.

It never occurred to us who heard this
statement, nor to those who made it, that this
was done because the men lacked courage.
It would be impossible of course from one
type of man to make any generalizations in
regard to the "average" soldier. One of
the hideous results of war is the inveterate
tendency of the " average " man to fall into
the spirit of retaliation. We were told in
two countries that the soldiers were being
supplied as fast as possible with short knives
because they could not advantageously use
their bayonets in the occasional hand-to-
hand encounters within the trenches them-
selves and we, of course, know of the men who
said of the bayonet charge : "Ah, that is
fighting, when the primitive man lets himself

THE REVOLT AGAINST WAR 75

go and does the sort of fighting which is
personal and definite!" We heard tales of
the reactions on both types of men and it is
farthest from my intention to add one word
to the campaign of calumny, to disparage
either the motives or the courage of the
long line of fighting soldiers, to repeat one
tale of horror which might increase that
poverty of heart induced by hatred.

In addition to the revolt against war on
the part of the young men, there was discern-
ible everywhere among the civilian popula-
tion two bodies of enthusiasm : one, and by
far the larger, believes that the war can be
settled only upon a military basis after a
series of smashing victories; the other, a
civil party, very much deprecates the exal-
tation of militarism and contends that the
longer the war is carried on, the longer the
military continues censoring the press and
exercising other powers not ordinarily ac-
corded to it — thus breaking down safeguards
of civil government, many of which have
been won at the hardest — the more difficult
it will be for normal civil life to reestablish
itself.

76 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

Many of the people whom we met were
therefore anxious that the war should be
speedily terminated — of course always a
peace with honor — if only because of its
effect upon the internal development of
national life. They believed in the war and
yet they labored under a certain apprehen-
sion that the longer it was continued the
more difficult it would be for the civil au-
thorities to win back the liberties they had
once possessed. In the warring capitals,
citizens are under military law and are sub-
ject to fine and imprisonment, or both, for
its infraction. The military authorities can,
on mere suspicion, arrest a citizen without
warrant and also enter his house. Such
"defence of the realm" acts are submitted
to patiently as a part of war, but the people
who represent the civil view of life, even in
the midst of their patriotic fervor and de-
votion to the army, long for some other form
of settlement than that obtained by military
victory. While they ardently desire a re-
lease from the intolerable strain, they realize
that to have salvation come through the
army would be to desperately entrench

THE REVOLT AGAINST WAR 77

militarism and to add dangerously to its
prestige and glory.

In Germany we met patriotic citizens who
felt that one of the dangers of a peace de-
termined through military successes, es-
pecially if those were won on the eastern
front, would be the likelihood that terms
would be made through Russia, establishing
militarism yet more firmly. If peace were
made through negotiations, then the western
nations under England's lead would have the
preponderance of influence; that is, the
military authorities would be more sym-
pathetic to the Russian type of settlement
and the civil authorities to the western type.
The longer the war goes on, however, the
more likely it is that the settlement will
depend upon the victories of one nation or
the other.

We were told in England that this war in
essence is a conflict between militarism and
democracy, but the situation is obviously
not so simple as that. War itself destroys
democracy wherever it thrives and tends to
entrench militarism. If the object of the
war is to down militarism, it must be clear

78 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

that the very prolongation of the war en-
trenches the military ideal not only in Russia
and Germany, but in the more democratic
nations as well. No one would urge that
a settlement through negotiations is the
only way to preserve democratic institu-
tions, but certainly the present method runs
great risk. The immediacy of negotiations
is therefore a factor in the situation. They
should be begun while the civil authorities
still have enough power to hold the military
to their own purposes and are not obliged
to give them the absolute control of the
destinies of the nation. If you point out
to an Englishman that democracy will not
gain if German militarism is crushed and a
new war party sits in every capital of Europe,
he will tell you that such a situation, if it
arises, must be attended to afterwards, that
at present the allies are crushing the Prussian
type of militarism. It seems clear however
to the neutral observer that in the mean-
time, while the crushing process goes on,
militarism is firmly lodged in men's minds
and that no body of men is seriously trying
to discover how far militarism is being

THE REVOLT AGAINST WAR 79

crushed by this war or how far civil forces
are merely becoming exhausted and methods
of negotiation discredited.

The belief that the restitution of Belgium
can only be obtained through "driving out
the invaders " by an opposing army has al-
ready become established in the minds of
thousands of people. ' Yfet we met, during our
weeks in Europe, many exiled Belgians,
who told us they could not go back to their
own country because of the fear that the
Germans would be beaten back over the
same territory that had already been dev-
astated and that a retreating army is always
the worst. Some of these Belgians hoped
that Belgium would be evacuated through
negotiations and treaties, and yet so com-
pletely has method become confused with
aim in this war, militarism with the object
to be accomplished, that in the desire to drive
the invaders out, the aim of getting the peace-
ful Belgians back in their own country
was for the rnpment overshadowed, although
to accomplish this through negotiation rather
than bloodshed would be an enormous gain
for all concerned. There are civilians in

8o WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

Germany who are anxious to hold the Ger-
man generals to their own statement that
they marched through Belgium as a matter
of military necessity and not for conquest,
and early in July a petition, signed by eighty-
four leading men of Germany, was presented
to the Chancellor, urging that there be no
annexation of territory as a result of the war.

If the Germans are to evacuate Belgium
without bloodshed, it must be through the
cooperation of such groups of civilians as
these. It is the civilian who is interested
in freeing the channels of trade, in breaking
down unnatural tariff walls, and restoring
life to a normal basis.

Yet so long as the military process ab-
sorbs the attention of all of Europe, it is
obvious that groups of civilians in different
countries are constantly becoming so en-
feebled that their counsels may easily be
overborne.

Everywhere we were conscious of a certain
revolt, not of nationalistic feeling nor of
patriotism, but of human nature itself as
of hedged in, harassed peoples, "as if the
Atlantic Ocean had been partitioned with

THE REVOLT AGAINST WAR 8 1

great bulkheads into private seas and the
Gulf Stream blocked in its course." There
had apparently been an accumulation within
national borders of those higher human
affections which should have had an outlet
into the larger life of' the world but could
not, because no international devices had
been provided for such expression. No
great central authority had been dealing
with this sum of human goodwill, as a scien-
tist deals with the body of knowledge in
his subject irrespective of its national origins,
and the nations themselves became confused
between what was legitimate patriotism and
those universal emotions which have nothing
to do with national frontiers.

CHAPTER IV

FACTORS IN CONTINUING THE WAR
JANE ADD AM s

(a) The Press

(b) Isolation of Peace Advocates

(c) No Adequate Offer of Negotiations

TRAVELLING rapidly, as we did, from one
country to another, perhaps nothing was more
striking than the diametrically opposing
opinions we found concerning identical oc-
currences or series of events.

We arrived in London two days after the
sinking of the Lusitania and read in many
columns the indignation against this "crown-
ing outrage of German piracy upon helpless
women and children." So profound was
this feeling that during the next few days
when we were still in London, the English
Parliament, following the attacks upon the
German bakeshops and other places of busi-
ness, decided to intern German subjects.
82

FACTORS IN CONTINUING THE WAR 83

Ten days later " when we reached Berlin,
their citizens were still rejoicing over the
victory which had been achieved by a tiny
submarine over the "great auxiliary cruiser of
the British Navy," in phrases reminding us
of the old story in our school books about
the Monitor and the Merrimac.

Inevitably the inferences from these widely
divergent facts were irreconcilable. Even
reasonable and justice-loving people in both
countries, who wished to be sure of their
data before passing judgment, would be quite
unable to deal impartially with the situation.
As to the large number of people found on
both sides who grasp eagerly at any atrocity
which may justify or increase the bitter
animosity against the enemy, we were ab-
solutely unable to determine whether the
hate produced the atrocities, or the atrocities
the hate.

Almost every tale we heard in London of
outrages on the part of German soldiers
against the helpless Belgians was repeated in
Vienna of the brutal behavior of the Cossack
soldiers in East Prussia. Our delegation
reached Italy ten days after war was de-

84 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

clared against Austria. A Socialist Member
of Parliament, proud of the fact that his
party had voted against the war appropria-
tion, told us unequivocally that "This was a
newspaper-made war," — that a campaign
conducted throughout the winter had cul-
minated in a sensational three days, when the
people reached the highest degree of excite-
ment. One is, of course, reminded of the old
nursery riddle : Which is first, the egg or the
hen ? Does public opinion control the press
or the reverse ? It was perhaps inevitable for
our Socialist friend to believe that the great
Italian banks with their interests in Dal-
matia were the actual power.

The press everywhere tended to make an
entire nation responsible for the crimes of
individuals, a tendency which is certainly
fraught with awful consequences, even though
the crimes for which the nation is held re-
sponsible may have originated in the gross
exaggeration of some trivial incident. The
very size and extent of the contention acts
like a madness.

This perhaps accounts for the impression
left upon our minds that in the various coun-

FACTORS IN CONTINUING THE WAR 85

tries the enthusiasm for continuing the war is
fed largely on a fund of animosity growing
out of the conduct of the war. Germany is
indignant because England's blockade was
an attempt to starve her women and children ;
England is on fire over the German atroci-
ties in Belgium. A young man in France
said, "We hope to be able very soon to squirt
petroleum into the German trenches so that
everything will easily catch fire." I re-
plied, "That seems very terrible/' "Yes,"
he said, "but think of the poisonous gas
and the horrible death of our men who were
asphyxiated/'

In each country, we were told of hideous
occurrences of warfare which demonstrated
that the continued existence of the enemy
was a menace to civilization. Constantly
one hears that Germany has done this;
the allies have done that; somebody tried
to do this and we prevented it by doing that.
But after all, great nations, however legiti-
mate the first cause of war may have been,
cannot conduct their operations from the
standpoint of reprisals, which is not a per-
missible method even among small groups.

86 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

Occasionally we met a man who said, "Of
course, in the end the war must be adjudi-
cated with the original causes as a factor, but
we are getting farther away from the causes
every day, and more and more the conduct
of the war is modifying its aim."

Is it because this war has been carried to
the very doorsteps of those people in Europe
who have reached a stage of sensibility
towards human suffering and an under-
standing of the differing individual which
has never been obtained before in human
history, that the gathering horror drives
them on ? or is the mind of Europe sub-
merged under a great emotionalism, inhibit-
ing normal family affections and daily inter-
ests so that thousands of people joyfully
surrender their children and all their pos-
sessions. A Frenchman looking around his
library said to us : "I used to think there was
something valuable in these books, but I
would throw them at once into the trenches,
if their burning would so heat the hands of
a soldier that he might shoot to kill one man
of that nation which is destroying the liberties
of Europe."

FACTORS IN CONTINUING THE WAR 87

Nevertheless the fanatical patriotism which
has risen so high in these countries, and which
is essentially so fine and imposing, cannot
last. The wave will come down, the crest
cannot be held indefinitely. Then men
must see the horrible things which are taking
place not as causes for continuing the war,
but as that which must never be allowed to
occur again. At the present moment, how-
ever, the man whose burning heart can find
no slightest justification for the loss of the
finest youth of Europe unless it results in
the establishment of such international courts
as will make war forever impossible, finds it
difficult to discover a vehicle through which
he may express this view. International
ideals for the moment are treated not only
with derision and contempt but as dangerous
to patriotism.

In every country we found evidence of
a group of men and women — how large, we
were, of course, unable to determine — who
although they were not opposed to the war
and regarded their own countries as sinned
against and not as sinning, still felt that
their respective countries ought to be con-

88 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

tent with a limited programme of victory.
Yet even in England a man who says
that peace ought to be made with Germany
on any other terms than dictation by the
allies is attacked by the newspapers as
pro-German, without any reference as to
whether those terms are favorable or not to
his country.

A good patriot of differing opinion finds
it almost impossible to reach his fellow
countrymen with that opinion, because he
would not for the world print anything which
might confuse the popular mind, for war
belongs to that state of society in which
right and wrong must be absolute.

The huge agglomerations of human beings
of which modern society is composed com-
municate with each other largely through
the printed word and, poor method as
it is, apparently public opinion cannot be
quickly discovered through any other agency.
Certainly the most touching interview we
had on the continent was with a man who
had been in a responsible position in England
when war was declared and who was over-
burdened equally with the sense that he had

FACTORS IN CONTINUING THE WAR 89

failed to convince his countrymen that the
war was unnecessary and with the futility of
making any further effort.

This lack of mobilization of public opinion
in so many of the countries of Europe is at
present a serious aspect of the war. Even in
the most autocratic countries, Governments
respond to public opinion and governmental
policies are modified as men of similar
opinion gather into small groups, as they
make a clear statement of that opinion, and
as they promote larger groups. At the pres-
ent moment this entire process in the modi-
fication of governmental policies is brought to
a standstill among the warring nations, even
in England where the very method of govern-
mental change depends upon the registry of
public opinion.

But as like-minded people within the
borders of a warring nation cannot find each
other, much less easily can the search be con-
ducted beyond the lines of battle. As we
went from one country to another, people
would say, "Did you find any one taking our
line, thinking as we do?" The people, as
a whole, do not know even the contemplated

90 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

terms of settlement and could only learn
them through a free and courageous press,
while the governmental officials themselves
could only thus obtain a full knowledge of
public opinion concerning the continuance
of the war. Every public man in Europe
knows that before the rulers will think of
peace, they must know that behind them,
if they advocate peace, there would be a
grateful and passionate opinion ready to
support them against the militarists. Even
pacifically inclined ministers in the Govern-
ment itself dare not talk of treating with the
enemy while the only vocal opinion in news-
papers and speeches is in favor of fighting
till the enemy surrenders unconditionally.
Preeminently in Great Britain and Ger-
many any peace negotiation can be stopped
by the militarist elements, which predominate
during war in Government circles. But how
can peace processes be begun if none of the
leading journals dare call upon "the various
Governments to declare what to each nation
is the essential and indispensable condition
for ceasing the conflict," which would of
course be but a preliminary to negotiations

FACTORS IN CONTINUING THE WAR 91

and the final terms of peace. If in the end
adjustment must be reached through the
coming together of like-minded people in
the contending nations, it is a thousand
pities that it should fail through lack of a
mechanism whereby they might find each
other. In the meantime, the very founda-
tions of a noble national life are being every-
where undermined by the constant dis-
paragement of other nations, and as each
fears nothing more than an appearance of
the weariness of the war, the desire for peace
filling many hearts is denied all journalistic
expression while the war spirit is continually
fed by the outrages of the war, as flames
are fed by fuel.

At moments I found myself filled with
a conviction that the next revolution against
tyranny would have to be a revolution
against the unscrupulous power of the press.
A distinguished European, accustomed to
addressing the civilized world through the
printed page, finding himself unable to
reach even his own countrymen, suggested to
us the plight of a caged lion as he vehemently
walked up and down a little alcove in our hotel,

92 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

expressing his exasperation and despair.
To my mind the message he was not
permitted to give was the one which Europe
needed above all others and the self-exiled
pacifists, French, German, Austrian, English,
and Belgian, whom we met in Switzerland,
were a curious comment on the freedom of
the press.

Two conclusions were inevitably forced
upon us. First: that the people of the
different countries could not secure the ma-
terial upon which they might form a sound
judgment of the situation, because the press
with the opportunity of determining opinion
by selecting data, had assumed the power
once exercised by the church when it gave
to the people only such knowledge as it
deemed fit for them to have. Second : that
in each country the leading minds were not
bent upon a solution nor to the great task
that would bring international order out of
the present anarchy, because they were ab-
sorbed in preconceived judgments, and had
become confused through the limitations
imposed upon their sources of information.
The civilian point of view and even a hint

FACTORS IN CONTINUING THE WAR 93

of the revolt against war was reflected in the
foreign offices themselves as we visited one
after another in five weeks. We were
received by Prime Minister Cort van der
Linden and Foreign Minister Loudon, in The
Hague ; Prime Minister Asquith and Foreign
Minister Sir Edward Grey, in London ;
Reichskanzler von Bethmann-Hollweg and
Foreign Minister von Jagow, in Berlin;
Prime Minister Stuergkh and Foreign Min-
ister Burian, in Vienna; Prime Minister
Tisza, in Budapest ; Prime Minister Salandra
and Foreign Minister Sonino, in Rome ; Prime
Minister Viviani and Foreign Minister Del-
casse, in Paris ; Foreign Minister d'Avignon,
in Havre; President Motta and Foreign
Minister Hoffman, in Berne.

Our message was a simple one. After
discussing our resolutions we ventured to
report to the men who are after all responsible
for the happenings of Europe that the fifteen
hundred women who met in The Hague,
coming in smaller or larger numbers from
twelve different countries, urge that what-
ever the causes of the war and however
necessary it may have been to carry it on

94 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

for the past ten months, that the time has
come for beginning some sort of negotiations
which must in the end take place unless the
war shall continue year after year and at
last be terminated through sheer exhaustion.
We implied that if Europe is in disorder be-
cause of deep-rooted injustices or because
certain nations are deprived of commercial,
political, or maritime opportunities, that the
solution can be discovered much better by
men who consider the situation on its merits
than by those who approach it on the basis
of military victories or losses.

In reply to this we heard everywhere,
again in very similar phrases, that a nation
at war cannot ask for negotiations nor even
express a willingness for them, lest the enemy
at once construe it as a symptom of weakness,
for when the terms are made, the side which
first suggested negotiations will suffer as
being considered the weaker side suing for
peace.

But they said, in all save one of these
foreign offices, that tentative propositions
should first be presented by some outside
power, — if neutral people commanding the

FACTORS IN CONTINUING THE WAR 95

respect of the foreign offices to whom their
propositions would be presented should study
the situation seriously and make propositions,
over and over again if necessary, something
might be found upon which negotiations
might begin, and that there were none of
the warring nations that would not be ready
to receive such service.

It may be natural for the minister of a
nation at war to say, "This country will
never receive negotiations ; we are going to
drive the enemy out inch by inch," but it is
difficult for him to repeat it to a delegation
of women who reply: "If a feasible proposi-
tion were presented to you, which might
mean the beginning of negotiations between
your country and your enemies, would you
decline to receive such a proposition ? Would
you feel justified to go on sacrificing the
young men of your country in order to attain
through bloodshed what might be obtained
by negotiations, the very purpose for which
the foreign office was established?" No
minister, of course, is willing to commit him-
self to such an undeviating policy.

On the contrary one of them said that

96 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

he had wondered many times since the war
began why women had remained silent so
long, adding that as women are not ex-
pected to fight they might easily have made
a protest against war which is denied to
men.

We went into the office of another high
official, a large, grizzled, formidable man.
When we had finished our presentation
and he said nothing, I remarked, "It perhaps
seems to you very foolish that women should
go about in this way ; but after all, the world
itself is so strange in this war situation that
our mission may be no more strange nor
foolish than the rest."

He banged his fist on the table. "Fool-
ish?" he said. "Not at all. These are the
first sensible words that have been uttered
in this room for ten months."

He continued : "That door opens from
time to time, and people come in to say,
'Mr. Minister, we must have more men,
we must have more ammunition, we must
have more money or we cannot go on with
this war/ At last the door opens and two
people walk in and say, 'Mr. Minister, why

FACTORS IN CONTINUING THE WAR 97

not substitute negotiations for fighting?'
They are the sensible ones."

Other people, of course, said that he was
an old man and losing his political power.
Yet he was an officer of the Government in
high place and the incident is repeated for
whatever value it may have. It is by no
means an isolated one, and we had other
testimonials of the same sort from the people
whose nations are at war.

Our mission was simple, and foolish it
may be, but it was not impossible. Perhaps
the ministers talked freely to us because
we were so absolutely unofficial. "Without
abandoning your cause and without lowering
your patriotism/' we practically said to the
representatives of these various nations,
"whatever it is which you ought in honor
to obtain, why are you not willing to submit
your case to a tribunal of fair-minded men ?
If your cause is as good as you are sure it is,
certainly such men will find the righteousness
which adheres within it." Responsible people
in all the warring powers said that if the
right medium could be found, there would
be no difficulty in submitting the case.

98 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

We do not wish to overestimate a very
slight achievement nor to take too seriously
the kindness with which the delegation was
received, but we do wish to record ourselves
as being quite sure that at least a few citizens
in these various countries, some of them
officials in high places, were grateful for the
effort we made.

CHAPTER V

AT THE NORTHERN CAPITALS
EMILY G. BALCH

THE second delegation, of which I was
a member, was assigned to the Scandinavian
countries and to Russia.

The delegation was made up of one from
each of the belligerent sides and one
from two neutral countries. It comprised
Chrystal Macmillan, one of the two very
able British delegates at the Congress;
Rosika Schwimmer, politically a Hungarian,
but to whom nothing human is alien;
Madam Ramondt-Hirschman, one of the
most active of the hospitable and capable
Dutch women who prepared the way for
the Congress ; and myself, coming from the
United States. Grace Wales, a Canadian,
the author of the well-known pamphlet "Con-
tinuous Mediation without Armistice" also
went with us to the Scandinavian countries,
nominally as our secretary.

99

100 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

The natural route from Amsterdam to
Copenhagen is overland through Germany to
Warnemiinde. To be sure, under war con-
ditions with no night trains, it takes two days,
with an over-night stop at Hamburg, but
this was the least of the difficulty. Our
two British friends could not cross "enemy"
territory, and to find a boat was not easy.
When found, it was a little freighter, with
no cabin but the captain's, no woman on
board, inconvenient in every way.

As only one passenger could go on the
boat, it was decided Miss Wales should go
ahead, this delay leaving Miss Macmillan
a week more for work on the very difficult
task of preparing our polyglot proceed-
ings for a printer whose proof-setting and
proof-reading customs were entirely strange
to us.

The other three of us went by train through
fields with thriving crops and few men-folk,
over heaths where prisoners of war were
at work converting the moor into ploughland,
past station platforms where fathers and
wives were bidding sad good-bys to their
soldier boys, and where girls with the red cross

AT THE NORTHERN CAPITALS 101

on their arms were serving refreshments to
passing troops.

In Copenhagen we were welcomed by our
Hague friends, photographed, interviewed,
feted. While all this has its value, as it gives
occasion for discussing peace issues and for
knitting international ties, our mission was a
formal one. We were accordingly very glad
when arrangements were completed for an
interview with Prime Minister Zahle, and Min-
ister of Foreign Affairs Scavenius. Immedi-
ately after the interview we left for Norway.

In Christiania our programme was even
fuller. Our first interview was with King
Haakon VII, who kept us so long that we
began to fear that, in our ignorance of
ceremonial, we had missed the signal which
ends a royal reception. Only at the end of
an hour and three-quarters it came. The
talk was wide-ranging, yet it ever centred
about the war. The King appeared to be
deeply interested in our mediation plan.
He spoke with evident satisfaction of Nor-
way's equal suffrage.

We went directly from the King to the
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ihlen, and later

102 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

were given an appointment with Knudsen,
the Prime Minister. We were also given
what is, we were told, the most formal recog-
nition that can be given to unofficial persons,
being received in the Parliament House by
the four presidents of the Storting or Parlia-
ment — President Castberg, president of the
Odelsting (one of the two coordinate cham-
bers), and a member of the Norwegian inter-
parliamentary group ; President Jahren, presi-
dent of the Lagting; President Aarsb ad, presi-
dent of the Storting when meeting in joint
session; and Vice-President Lo viand. We
were interested in seeing on the walls the por-
trait of the first woman member of Parliament.

At a committee meeting at the Nobel In-
stitute we had an opportunity to discuss
peace programmes with Christian Lange,
secretary of the Interparliamentary Union.

In Stockholm, whither we proceeded at
once, we had a very interesting interview with
Wallenberg, the foreign minister. He is
not only a statesman but a man of affairs
and a great banker, and appears to be throw-
ing all his weight on the side of peace.

Among distinguished Swedes who showed

AT THE NORTHERN CAPITALS 103

their sympathy and interest, at one of the
meetings arranged for us we were proud to
number Selma Lagerlof.

We had already spent over a fortnight
upon our way when, on the evening of June 7,
we started for Russia. At this point we
had to make certain changes. Rosika
Schwimmer, being technically an enemy,
could not go to Russia, and in her stead our
Scandinavian friends chose for us Baroness
Ellen Palmstierna. Madam Schwimmer, re-
turning, went first to Denmark, where she
took part in the great procession with which
the Danish women celebrated the signing of
the new constitution securing equal suffrage
to Denmark.

The usual route from Stockholm to Petro-
grad is across the narrow seas to Abo in
Finland. This passage is now closed to
travellers, which means that one must make
a railroad journey of three days and three
nights round the head of the Gulf of Bothnia.
We had been told that this journey would be
very hard travelling, but we did not find it so,
although we were glad to reach the Hotel
Astoria in Petrograd a little before midnight

104 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

on June 10. We stayed here an unexpectedly
long time, — a fortnight, in fact, — and this
gave us opportunity to see much of this fine
and interesting capital, filled to-day with
Red Cross "lazarets" and with wounded;
a clean, orderly, and friendly city, as we ob-
served it.

Our object was an interview with SazonofF,
Minister of Foreign Affairs, and it was a
memorable experience to sit for nearly an
hour in conference with one who has so large
a part in the making of history in this tragic
crisis. He appeared to be already familiar
with the resolutions passed at The Hague,
and interested to consider them with us.

Our return trip took us, on practically the
longest day of the year, to the farthest point
of our journey, well to the north of Arch-
angel. Here, although in the vicissitudes of
woods and hills we could not command the
horizon, we had the pleasure of seeing the
sun well risen before twelve minutes after
midnight. It was probably below the hori-
zon a scant twenty minutes.

In Stockholm we found that during our
absence arrangements had been completed

AT THE NORTHERN CAPITALS 105

by the Swedish women for a wonderful set
of simultaneous peace meetings. In three
hundred and forty-three places, meetings
were held on Sunday, June 27; at each the
same speech — a very able one — was de-
livered and the same resolution passed. In
spite of the fact of its being a season when
people are scattered and meetings are thought
to be impracticable, the demonstration which
we attended gathered perhaps two thousand
people, besides an overflow of some twelve
hundred, while eight hundred could not get
in at all. Yet this was only one of five meet-
ings in Stockholm alone. The resolution
affirmed the main resolutions of our Hague
Congress, and called for mediation.

In the Scandinavian countries we saw
ministers again on our return journey, and
in Holland we had further interviews with
Minister of Foreign Affairs Louden and the
prime minister. It seemed best for Rosika
Schwimmer and Mme. Ramondt to go again
to Berlin, and for Chrystal Macmillan and me
to visit London before I should return to
America and report all this to President
Wilson, as has now been done.

106 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

Our London fortnight was in some ways
the most absorbing of all. We met many
interesting people, including the women of
our own British Committee.

We saw, too, officers of the National Peace
Council ; and of the League of Peace and
Freedom; the chairman of the conference
upon the Pacifist Philosophy of Life, held in
London in July, and of the Fellowship of
Reconciliation; members of the executive
committee of the Representative Peace Con-
ference, convened by the Society of Friends ;
and various members of the Union of Demo-
cratic Control.

We met many others, ail were eager to
hear of our undertaking, and with one or
two marked exceptions, all were in their own
way more or less distinctly pacifist in their
outlook. I was conscious that they were
far from reflecting average English feeling;
yet, even so, what a testimony to the genuine-
ness of English liberty of thought and the
breadth of English humanism were their keen
and generous views !

Two groups with whom I did not come
into contact were the Stop the War Com-

AT THE NORTHERN CAPITALS 107

mittee and the No Conscription Fellow-
ship.

What was accomplished by the Hague
Congress and the resulting undertakings,
what their significance, is something that we
do not yet fully know, ourselves. Five
things stand out in my estimate of it all :

1. The noble humanity of the women who
gathered at The Hague, all finding firm and
common ground under their feet even in
the midst of the war ;

2. The well-wrought-out platform ;

3. The permanent international pacifist
organization of women, now effected ;

4. A plan already under way for calling a
congress of these women at the time and
place where peace terms are being agreed
on, when that time comes ;

5. The mission to the Governments, in its
immediate and remoter bearings.

I want to say a few words more regarding
these last three points. And first as to
permanent organization of women's work
for durable peace. The new international
headquarters at 467 Keizersgracht, Amster-
dam, are but the symbol of the organization

108 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

which women are eagerly forming every-
where. In all countries national groups
of the International Women's Committee for
Permanent Peace are being organized — in
France (where at first there was considerable
misunderstanding about the movement), in
Germany, in Hungary, in England, in the
Scandinavian countries, and in Russia. The
American office is the national headquarters
of the Women's Peace Party in Chicago.

Money and workers are needed and
America, unstricken by war, must do more
than its share. Its fair share, even, is a
large one. The work already done has
cost considerable sums, although many of
the delegates, including all of those from the
United States, paid all their own travelling
expenses and contributed as well to the
general expenses of the Congress. The
future offers opportunity for still larger
investments.

The coming Peace Congress of women
must be planned 'and financed. This is
my second point. Peace negotiations may
come early and unexpectedly or, alas, they
may be delayed for years; but sometime,

AT THE NORTHERN CAPITALS 109

come they must. And then the women
must gather to note, to discuss, and to urge
terms of peace, as contrasted with terms of
a short-sighted armistice based on log-rolling
politics. Professor LaFontaine of Belgium
said to me recently that he considered the
preparations for this future Congress, which
were laid at The Hague, as the most impor-
tant part of our work there.

Of my last point, the mission to the
Governments, it is too early to speak, both
because the work is confidential and can-
not be reported and because it is still in
process. However, I may say that what
was planned as a comparatively formal
presentation of the resolutions of our Con-
gress developed into something more than
this. Never again must women dare to
believe that they are without responsibility
because they are without power. Public
opinion is power; strong and reasonable
feeling is power; determination, which is a
twin sister of faith or vision, is power.
When our unaccustomed representatives
knocked at the doors of the Chancelleries of
Europe, there was not one but opened.

HO WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

They were received gravely, kindly, perhaps
gladly, by twenty-one ministers, the presi-
dents of two republics, a king, and the Pope.
All, apparently, recognized without argu-
ment that an expression of the public opinion
of a large body of women had every claim
to consideration in questions of war and
peace.

CHAPTER VI

THE TIME FOR MAKING PEACE
EMILY G. BALCH

THERE is a widespread feeling that this is
not the moment to talk of a European peace.
On the contrary, if we look into the matter
more deeply, there are good reasons to believe
that the psychological moment is very close
upon us. If, in the wisdom that comes
after the event, we see that the United States
was dilatory when it might have helped to
open the way to end bloodshed and to make
a fair and lasting settlement, we shall have
cause for deep self-reproach.

The question of peace is a question of
terms. Every country desires peace at the
earliest possible moment, if peace can be
had on what it regards as satisfactory terms.
Peace is possible whenever the moment
comes when each side would accept what
the other side would grant, but from the
in

112 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

international or human point of view a
satisfactory peace is possible only when these
claims and concessions are such as to forward,
not to hinder, human progress. If Ger-
many's terms are the annexation of Belgium
and part of France and a military hegemony
over the rest of Europe, or if the terms of
France or England include "wiping Germany
off the map of Europe," then there is no
possibility of peace at this time or at any
time that can be foreseen, nor does the world
desire peace on these terms.

In each country there are those that want
to continue the fight until military supremacy
is achieved, in each there are powerful forces
that seek a settlement of the opposite type,
one which instead of containing within
itself the threats to international stability
that are involved in annexation, humiliation
of the enemy, and competition between arma-
ments, shall secure national independence
and respect for rights of minorities, and
foster international cooperation.

In one sense the present war is a war
between the two great sets of belligerent
powers, in another and more significant

THE TIME FOR MAKING PEACE 113

sense, it is a struggle between two conceptions
of national policy. The catchwords im-
perialism and democracy indicate briefly
the two opposing ideas. In every country
both are represented, though in varying pro-
portions, and in every country there is a
strife between them.

The overriding of the regular civil govern-
ment by the military authorities in all the
warring countries is one of the too little
understood effects of the war. The forms
of constitutionalism may be undisturbed
but as inter arma leges silent so military power
tends to control the representatives of the
people none the less really because unob-
trusively. Von Tirpitz, Kitchener, Joffre,
the Grand Duke Nicholas have tended to
overshadow their nominal rulers.

Another effect of war is that as between
the two contending voices, one is presented
with a megaphone and the other is muffled
if not gagged. Papers and platforms are
open to "patriotic" utterances as patriotism
is understood by the jingoes; the moderate
is silenced not alone by the censor, not
alone by social pressure, but by his own sense

114 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

of the effect abroad of all that gives an im-
pression of internal division and a readiness
to quit the fight. In our own country
during the tension with Germany loyal
Americans who believe that the case of
the United States is not a strong one (and a
hundred million people cannot all think alike
on such an issue), those who loathe the idea
of going to war cannot and will not seek any
commensurate expression of their views for
fear this may make it harder for our Govern-
ment to induce Germany to render her naval
warfare less inhuman.

Thus everywhere war gives an exaggerated
influence to militaristic and jingo forces and
creates a false impression of the pressure for
extreme terms as a basis of settlement.

Each side, of course, would like to make
peace when the struggle, which is in a rough
general sense a stalemate, is marked by some
incident favorable to itself. Germany would
like to make peace from the crest of the wave
of her invasion of Russia; Russia and Eng-
land from a conquered Constantinople. If
the disinterested neutrals, who alone are
free to act for peace, wait for the moment

THE TIME FOR MAKING PEACE 115

when neither side has any advantage, they
will wait long indeed. The minor ups and
downs of the war are shifting and unpredict-
able, but their importance is much less than
it appears. The gains that either makes are
as nothing to its losses. The grim unques-
tioned permanent fact, which affects both
sides and which is to the changing fortunes
of battle as the miles of immovable ocean
depths are to the waves on its surface, —
this all-outweighing fact is the intolerable
burden of continued war.

This fact is that which makes a momentary
advantage comparatively unimportant. All
the belligerents want peace; though they
none of them want it enough to cry "I
surrender/' they all want it enough to be
ready to treat.

The making of peace involves not only
the questions of the character of the terms,
of demands more or less extreme — it also
involves the question of the principle accord-
ing to which settlements are to be made.
Here too there are two conflicting concep-
tions.

On the one hand there is the assumption

n6 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

that military advantage must be represented
quid pro quo in the terms, — so much vic-
tory, so much corresponding advantage in
the terms. There is even the commercial
conception of war as an investment and
the idea that the fighter has a right to in-
demnity for what he has spent.

On the other hand, starting from the fact
that the war has thrown certain international
adjustments into the melting pot, the prob-
lem is to create a new adjustment such as
on the whole shall be as generally satisfac-
tory and contain as much promise of sta-
bility as possible.

The gains won by force have no claims that
any one is bound to respect. The expendi-
ture of blood and treasure is no basis for a
demand for reimbursement, no one has con-
tracted to render any return for it, and it is
to the general interest that such expenditure,
undertaken on speculation, should never
prove a good investment. Admitting these
things, yet since the arbitrament of war is
an arbitrament of force, this fact is bound to
tell in the resulting adjustment. But a
fact that it is important to understand is

THE TIME FOR MAKING PEACE 117

that with a given balance of relative strength
as between the two sides, an equilibrium may
be reached in more than one way, as there
are equations which admit of more than one
solution. The equilibrium of peace might
be secured by balancing unjust acquisition
against unjust acquisition or by balancing
magnanimous concession against magnani-
mous concession.

A mediator or mediating group, without
throwing any weight into the scale of one
or the other side, can help to find the equi-
librium on the higher rather than the lower
level. We find a parallel in the economic
sphere when there is a choice between a
balance based on low wages and low efficiency
and one based on high wages and high
efficiency and when the state, not interfering
with the economic balance, yet helps to
secure that balance by the socially desirable
method.

On the basis of military advantage or on
the basis of military costs the neutrals have
no claim to be heard in the settlement.
The soldier is genuinely aggrieved and
outraged that they should mix in the matter

Ii8 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

at all. Yet, even on the plane of fighting
power, unexhausted neutrals are capable of
throwing a sword into the scale and on the
plea of costs suffered they have good claim
to a voice. It is however as representatives
of civilization and the true interests of all
sides alike, that those who have not been in
the thick of the conflict can and should be of
use in the settlement and help to fix it on
the higher plane.

The settlement of a war by outsiders —
not their mere friendly cooperation in finding
acceptable terms — is something that has
often occurred, exhibiting that curious mix-
ture of the crassest brute force with the
most ambitious idealism which frequently
characterizes the conduct of international
dealings. The fruits of victory were refused
to Russia by the Congress of Berlin in 1878,
Europe recently denied to Japan the spoils of
her war with China, the results of the Balkan
wars were largely determined by those who
had done none of the fighting. While mere
physical might played a large part in such
interferences from the outside, there is some-
thing besides hypocrisy in the claim of the

THE TIME FOR MAKING PEACE 119

statesmen of countries which had taken no
part in a war to speak on behalf of freedom,
progress, and peace.

A peace involving annexation of unwilling
peoples could never be a lasting one. The
widespread sense of irritation at all talk of
peace at present seems to be due to a feeling
that a settlement now would be a settlement
which would leave Belgium, if not part of
France, in German hands. Such a settle-
ment would be as disastrous to Germany as
to any nation. It might put an end to
military operations, but it certainly would
not bring peace, if we give any moral content
to that much-abused word. Europe was not
at peace before August, 1914, nor Poland for
long before, nor Ireland, nor Alsace, nor
Finland. Any community which, if it could,
would fight to change its political status
may be quiet under coercion, but it is not at
peace. Neither would Europe be at peace
with Germany in Belgium.

The question is, then, what sort of peace
may we hope for now — on what terms, on
what principles ?

We may be sure that each side is ready to

120 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

concede more and to demand less than ap-
pears on the surface or than it is ready to
advertise. The summer campaign, in which
marked advantages are most likely, once
over, the belligerents are faced with a winter
in the trenches which will cost on all sides,
in money and in suffering, out of all pro-
portion to the gains that can be hoped for.
It must be remembered, too, that the ad-
vantages hitherto won are not all on one side,
but that each side has something to concede.
The British annexations of Egypt and Cyprus
may be formal rather than substantial
changes, but the conquest of Germany's
colonies, large and small, Southwest Africa,
Togo Land, Samoa, Neu-Pommern, Kaiser
Wilhelm's Land, the Solomon, Caroline,
and Marshall islands, to say nothing of
Kiao-Chao — and probably Russian gains
at the expense of Turkey in the East, give
bargaining power to the allies. So, even
without success in the Dardanelles, does their
ability to thwart or forward German enter-
prise in Asia Minor and Mesopotamia or
possibly in purchasable parts of Africa or
elsewhere. Friends of Finland and of Poland

THE TIME FOR MAKING PEACE 121

must see to it that the debatable lands of
the Eastern as well as of the Western front
are kept in mind. From the point of view
of Poland the main thing to be desired is
the union of the three dismembered parts —
Russian, German, and Austrian Poland —
and their fusion in some sort of a buffer
state, independent or at least essentially
autonomous. Something like this appears
to be the purpose of both Germany and
Russia, with the difference that this Polish
state would be in the one case under Teu-
tonic, in the other under Russian auspices.
No one knows, as between the two, which
would be the choice of the majority of the
Poles concerned. Concessions to Germany
in Finland and in Poland, especially if coupled
with adequate security from nationalistic
oppression, might prove to be in the ultimate
interest of European peace, and would render
it easier for Germany to make the concession
on her side of complete withdrawal in the
West. Very important too are the con-
cessions in regard to naval control of the
seas that Great Britain ought to be willing
to make if the safety of her commerce and

122 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

her intercolonial communications could be
secured otherwise, and this would seem to
be the natural counterpart of substantial
steps toward disarmament on land.

But all this is speculation. The fact,
obvious to those who look below the surface,
is that every belligerent power is carrying on
a war deadly to itself, that bankruptcy
looms ahead, that industrial revolt threatens,
not at the moment but in a none too distant
future, that racial stocks are being irreparably
depleted. The prestige of Europe, of the
Christian Church, of the white race, is
lowered inch -by inch with the progress of
the struggle which is continually closer to
the debacle of a civilization.

Each power would best like peace on its
own terms, although our common civiliza-
tion would suffer by the imposition of ex-
treme terms by any power. Each power
would be thankful indeed to secure an
early peace without humiliation on terms
a long way short of its extreme demands.
There is every reason to believe that a vig-
orous initiative by representatives of the
neutral powers of the world could at this

THE TIME FOR MAKING PEACE 123

moment begin a move toward negotiations,
and lead the way to a settlement which, please
God, shall be a step toward a nobler and
more intelligent civilization than we have
yet enjoyed.

CHAPTER VII

WOMEN AND INTERNATIONALISM
JANE ADD AM s

THE group of women from five of the
European nations who, under the leadership
of Dr. Aletta Jacobs of Amsterdam, con-
vened the International Congress of Women
at The Hague, were confident that although
none of the existing international associations
had met since the beginning of the war,
the women, including those from the bellig-
erent nations, would be able to come to-
gether in all sobriety and friendliness to
discuss their common aims and the perilous
stake they all held in the war.

The women who attended the Congress
from the warring countries came from home
at a moment when the individual, through
his own overwhelming patriotism, fairly
merges his personal welfare, his convictions,
almost his sense of identity, into the na-
124

WOMEN AND INTERNATIONALISM 125

tional consciousness. It is a precious mo-
ment in human experience, almost worth the
price of war, but it made the journey of
the women leaving home to attend the
Congress little short of an act of heroism.
Even to appear to differ from those she
loves in the hour of their affliction has ever
been the supreme test of a woman's con-
science.

For the women who came from neutral
nations there were also great difficulties.
In the Scandinavian countries women are
enfranchised and for long months had been
sensitive to the unusual international con-
ditions which might so easily jeopardize
the peace of a neutral nation and because
in a large Congress an exaggerated word
spoken, or reported as spoken, might easily
make new complications, they too took risks
and made a moral venture.

The fifteen hundred women who came to
the Congress in the face of such difficulties
must have been impelled by some profound
and spiritual forces. During a year when
the spirit of internationalism had apparently
broken down, they came together to declare

126 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

the validity of the internationalism which
surrounds and completes national life, even
as national life itself surrounds and completes
family life; to insist that internationalism
does not conflict with patriotism on one side
any more than family devotion conflicts
with it upon the other.

In the shadow of the intolerable knowledge
of what war means, revealed so minutely
during the previous months, these women
also made solemn protest against that of
which they knew. The protest may have
been feeble, but the world progresses, in the
slow and halting manner in which it does
progress, only in proportion to the moral
energy exerted by the men and women
living in it ; advance in international affairs,
as elsewhere, must be secured by the human
will and understanding united for conscious
ends.

The delegates to the Congress were not
without a sense of complicity in the war, and
so aware of the bloodshed and desolation
surrounding them that their deliberations
at moments took on the solemn tone of
those who talk around the bedside of the

WOMEN AND INTERNATIONALISM 127

dying. It was intimated on the floor of
the Congress that the time may come when
the exhausted survivors of the war may
well reproach women for their inaction during
this year. It is possible they may then say
that when a perfervid devotion to the ideals
of patriotism drove thousands of men into
international warfare, the women refused
to accept the challenge for the things of the
spirit and in that moment of terror they
too failed to assert the supreme sanctity of
human life. We were told that wounded
lads, lying in helpless pain and waiting too
long for the field ambulance, call out con-
stantly for their mothers, impotently be-
seeching them for help ; of soldiers who say
to their hospital nurses : "We can do nothing
for ourselves but go back to the trenches
so long as we are able. Cannot the women
do something about this war ? Are you kind
to us only when we are wounded ?" There
is no one else to whom they dare so speak,
revealing the heart of the little child which
each man carries within his own even when
it beats under a uniform.

The belief that a woman is against war

128 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

simply because she is a woman and not a man
cannot of course be substantiated. In every
country there are women who believe that war
is inevitable and righteous ; the majority of
women as well as men in the nations at
war doubtless hold that conviction. On the
other hand, quite as an artist in an artillery
corps commanded to fire upon a beautiful
building like the duomo at Florence would
be deterred by a compunction unknown to
the man who had never given himself to
creating beauty and did not know the inti-
mate cost of it, so women, who have brought
men into the world and nurtured them until
they reach the age for fighting, must ex-
perience a peculiar revulsion when they
see them destroyed, irrespective of the
country in which these men may have been
born.

Perhaps the most pathetic women we met,
either at the Congress or later, were those
who had sent their sons and husbands into
the war, having themselves ceased to believe
in it. I remember one mother who said :
"Yes, I lost my son in the first three months
of the war and I am thankful he died early

WOMEN AND INTERNATIONALISM 129

before he harmed the son of any other
woman called an enemy." To another
woman, who as well as her husband was a
pacifist, I said, "It must be hard for you and
your husband to have lost a son in battle,"
and she replied quickly: "He did not die in
battle, I am happy to say he never engaged
in battle. He died of blood poisoning in
one of the trenches, but we have reason to
believe there had been no active engagement
where he was stationed." The husband of
another woman had gone to the front, telling
her that under no circumstances would he
be driven to kill a fellowman. One night
he met a sentry from whom she believes
he might have defended himself but he lost
his life rather than put another man out of
existence.

It was also said at the Congress that the
appeals for the organization of the world
upon peaceful lines may have been made too
exclusively to reason and a sense of justice,
that reason is only a part of the human
endowment; emotion and deep-set racial
impulses must be utilized as well — those
primitive human urgings to foster life and

130 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

to protect the helpless, of which women
were the earliest custodians, and even the
social and gregarious instincts that we share
with the animals themselves. These uni-
versal desires must be given opportunities
to expand and to have a recognized place
in the formal organization of international
relations which, up to this moment, have
rested so exclusively upon purely legal foun-
dations in spite of the fact that international
law is comparatively undeveloped. There
is an international commerce, a great system
of international finance, and many other
fields in which relationships are not yet de-
fined in law, quite as many of our most
settled national customs have never been
embodied in law at all. It would be impos-
sible to adjudicate certain of the underlying
economic and social causes of this war ac-
cording to existing international law and
this might therefore make more feasible the
proposition urged by the Women's Congress
at The Hague, of a conference of neutral
nations composed of men who have had in-
ternational experience so long and so un-
consciously that they have come to think

WOMEN AND INTERNATIONALISM 131

not merely in the terms but in the realities
of internationalism and would therefore
readily deal with the economic and human
element involved in the situation. Such a
conference would represent not one country
or another, but human experience as it has
developed during the last decades in Europe.
It would stand not for "peace at any price,"
but would seriously and painstakingly en-
deavor to discover the price to be paid for
peace, which should if possible be permanent
as well as immediate. The neutral nations
might well say: "Standing outside, as we
do, refusing to judge your cause, because
that must be left to the verdict of history,
we beg of you to remember that as life is
being lived at this moment on this planet
of ours, difficult and complicated situations
must in the end be decided and adjudicated
by the best minds and the finest good will
that can be brought to bear upon them.
We who are outside of this fury of fighting
agree that you have all proven your valor,
you have demonstrated the splendor of
patriotism and of united action, but we beg
of you, in the name of the humane values of

132 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

life, in the name of those spiritual bonds you
once venerated, to allow us to bring in some
other method for ending the conflict. We
believe that only through help from the out-
side will this curious spell be broken. Great
and wonderful as the war has been in
certain aspects, it cannot commend itself
to the people of neutral nations who are striv-
ing to look at life rationally. It is certainly
possible to give powers of negotiation to some
body of men who, without guile and without
personal or nationalistic ambitions, will bend
their best energies to the task of adjudica-

tion."

A survey of the situation from the humane
and social standpoint would consider for in-
stance the necessity of feeding those people
in the southeast portion of Europe who are
pitifully underfed when there is a shortage
of crops, in relation to the possession of warm-
water harbors which would enable Russia
to send them her great stores of wheat.
Such harbors would be considered not in
their political significance, as when the block-
ade of the Bosphorus during the Tripolis
War put a stop to the transport of crops

WOMEN AND INTERNATIONALISM 133

from Odessa to the Mediterranean, not from
a point of view of the claims of Russia nor
the counterclaims of some other nation, but
from the point of view of the needs of Europe.
If men of such temper, experience, and
understanding of life were to make proposi-
tions to the various Governments, not in
order to placate the claims of one nation
and to balance them against the claims of
another, but from the human standpoint,
there is little doubt but that the international
spirit would again reassert itself and might
eventually obtain a hearing. If the purely
legalistic aspects were not overstressed, such
a raising of the international standard would
doubtless be reenforced in majny ways.
For centuries Europe has not been without
a witness to the spiritual unity of nations.
Pope Benedict XV, who gave our delega-
tion an audience of half an hour, and Cardinal
Gaspari, in an extended interview, made it
evident that the men with religious re-
sponsibility fear keenly the results of this
war; while the statesmen see in it a throw-
back to civilization, the great international
Church views it as a breeder of animosities

134 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

which will tear down and rend to pieces
the work of years.

We also met in several countries the repre-
sentatives of Protestant Churches organized
into World Alliances or International Friend-
ships, and countless individuals who could
scarcely brook the horror of Jew fighting
against Jew, Christian against Christian.

The International Congress of Women
at The Hague passed a resolution to hold a
meeting "in the same place and at the same
time as the Conference of the Powers which
shall frame the terms of the peace settlement
after the war, for the purpose of presenting
practical proposals to that Conference." 1
We recalled the fact that at the Congress
of Vienna, held in 1815, in addition to de-
termining by treaty the redistribution of
the territory conquered by Napoleon, the
slave trade was denounced and declared to
be "contrary to the principles of civilization
and human rights," although of course the

1 The reader is referred to the official report of the Inter-
national Congress of Women at The Hague for a fuller account
of this resolution and the organization already effected for
carrying out its provisions.

WOMEN AND INTERNATIONALISM 135

abolition of slavery was a matter for each
state to determine for itself.

Within the borders of every country at war
there is released a vast amount of idealism,
without which war could never be carried on ;
a fund which might still be drawn upon when
the time for settlement arrives. If the peo-
ple knew that through final negotiations
Europe would be so remade and internation-
alized that further wars would be impossible,
many of them would feel that the death
of thousands of young men had not been
in vain, that the youth of our generation
had thus contributed to the inauguration of
a new era in human existence. It is, there-
fore, both because of the precedent in 1815
and at other times of peace negotiations
when social reforms have been considered,
and because idealism runs high in the warring
nations, that the women in the Hague
Congress considered it feasible to urge a
declaration that "the exclusion of women
from citizenship is contrary to the principles
of civilization and human right," as one of
the fundamental measures embodied in their
resolutions for permanent peace.

136 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

But perhaps our hopes for such action
are founded chiefly upon the fact that the
settlement at the end of this war may
definitely recognize a fundamental change in
the functions of government taking place in
all civilized nations, a change evoked as the
result of concrete, social, and economic
conditions, approximating similarity all over
the world. The recent entrance of women
into citizenship coming on so rapidly not
only in the nations of Europe and America,
but discernible in certain Asiatic nations as
well, is doubtless one manifestation of this
change, and the so-called radical or progres-
sive element in each nation, whether they
like it or not, recognize it as such. Never-
theless, there are men in each of these
countries even among those who would
grant the franchise to women in city and
state, to whom it is still repugnant that
women should evince an interest in interna-
tional affairs. These men argue that a
woman's municipal vote may be cast for
the regulation of contagious diseases, her
state vote for protection of working children,
and that war no longer obtains between cities

WOMEN AND INTERNATIONALISM 137

or even between states ; but because war
is still legitimate in settling international
difficulties, and because international re-
lations are so much a matter of fortified
boundaries and standing armies, that it is
preposterous for women who cannot fight,
to consider them. Furthermore, when war
was practically man's sole occupation, no
one had a voice in the deliberations of the
nation save those responsible for its defence,
the king, the nobles, the knights. In the
succeeding centuries, as other tests of social
utility have been developed and the primitive
test of fighting has subsided, the electorate
has been steadily enlarged, the bourgeoisie,
the working man, and last the woman, each
group largely following its own interests as
government took them over, — the regula-
tion of commercial relations, of industrial
conditions, of the health and education of
children. Only in time of war is government
thrown back to its primitive and sole func-
tion of self-defence, belittling for the mo-
ment the many other real interests of which
it is the guardian. War moreover has always
treated the lives of men and women broadly,

138 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

as a landscape painter who suppresses all
details — "The man bold, combative, con-
quering; woman sympathetic, healing the
wounds that war has made."

But because this primitive conception of
the function of government and of the ob-
solete division between the lives of men and
women has obtained during the long months
of the European war, there is obviously great
need at the end of the war that women
should attempt, in an organized capacity,
to make their contribution to that govern-
mental internationalism between the nations
which shall in some measure approximate
the genuine internationalism already devel-
oped in so many directions among the
peoples. In normal times, moreover, all
modern Governments with any living relation
to the great developments in commerce,
industry, sanitary science, or a dozen other
aspects of contemporary life, are coming to
realize that the current type of government
implies the frequent subordination of an
isolated nationalism to general interna-
tional interests. It is hoped that this new
approach to international relationships,

WOMEN AND INTERNATIONALISM 139

typified by the international postal system
and a hundred other semi-governmental
regulations, will be vital enough to assert it-
self at the end of this war as over against the
militaristic and "armed peace" relationships.

An organized and formal effort on the
part of women would add but one more
to that long procession of outstanding wit-
nesses who in each generation have urged
juster and more vital international relations
between Governments. Each exponent in
this long effort to place law above force
was called a dreamer and a coward, but each
did his utmost to express clearly the truth
that was in him, and beyond that human
effort cannot go.

This tide of endeavor has probably never
been so full as at the present moment.
Religious, social, and economic associations,
many of them organized since the war began,
are making their contributions to the same
great end. Several of them are planning to
meet at "the Conference of the Powers
which shall frame the terms of the peace
settlement after this war," and such meetings
are not without valuable precedent.

140 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

A federation or a council of European
powers should not be considered impossible
from the very experience of the nations now
at war. The German Empire, Consolidated
Italy, or the United Kingdom have been
evolved from separate states which had
previously been at war with each other during
centuries; the response to the call of im-
perialistic England, during the last months,
for more troops has shown that patriotic
emotion can be extended to include the Boers
of South Africa and the natives of India;
certain of these great federated states and
empires have again formed alliances with
each other and are fighting together against
a common enemy.

Is it too much to hope that the good will
and the consciousness of common aims and
responsibilities can be extended to include
all the European nations and that devices for
international government can be provided,
able to deal in the interests of the whole with
each difficult situation as it arises ? The
very experience of this war should demon-
strate its feasibility and the analogy inev-
itably suggests itself that as the states of

WOMEN AND INTERNATIONALISM 141

Germany and Italy came together under the
pressure of war, possibly this larger feder-
ation may be obtained under the same sense
of united effort.

Out of the present situation, which certainly
"presents the spectacle of the breakdown of
the whole philosophy of nationalism, politi-
cal, racial, and cultural," may conceivably
issue a new birth of internationalism, founded
not so much upon arbitration treaties, to be
used in time of disturbance, as upon govern-
mental devices designed to protect and en-
hance the fruitful processes of cooperation
in the great experiment of living together in
a world become conscious of itself.

APPENDIX I
OPINIONS OF THE CONGRESS

"... The deliberations of the Congress of
Women at The Hague was the appeal away
from passion and insane hatred to balance of
judgment and to truth inspired by reason.

"A visitor who sat in the gallery was impressed
by the similarity in personality and dress of the
delegates who occupied the body of the hall.
There was nothing in general appearance to
distinguish one nationality from another, and
looking into our own hearts we beheld as in a
mirror the hearts of all those who were assembled
with us, because deep in our own hearts lies the
common heart of humanity. We realised that
the fear and mistrust that had been fostered
between the peoples of the nations was an il-
lusion. We discovered that at the bottom peace
was nothing more or less than communal love.
There could be nothing negative in the idea of
peace. War is the negative. Peace is the high-
est effort of the human brain applied to the
organisation of the life and being of the peoples
of the world on the basis of cooperation. It
i43

144 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

cannot be secured with treaties or maintained
by armaments; it must be founded ultimately
on the public opinion of enlightened and free
democracies knit together by organised associa-
tion in common ideals and common enterprises.

"It was to the furtherance of such an ideal
that the representatives of the Women's Con-
gress pledged their strenuous and passionate
endeavour.

"London.

"EMMELINE PETHICK LAWRENCE."

"It seems ludicrous to imagine that there is
one woman in the world presumptuous enough
to believe that an international women's con-
gress could end this maddest of all wars. What
did we intend then ? I hear our opponents ask.

"To protest against the useless destruction of
the highest fruits of civilisation.

"To protest against this human slaughter.

"To protest against the mad national hatred.

"To protest against the war and all its ac-
companiment.

"To protest not only with words, but with
deeds; and this Congress was a deed. . . .

"But what did the Congress give to those of

APPENDIX I 145

us who took part in it? I cannot know what
it gave to others, only what it gave to me per-
sonally. The days in The Hague were a rest
after months of anguish — a rest amongst those
who felt the same. The days in The Hague
gave me an answer to the question which I had
asked myself since the outbreak of war in anxious
days and weary nights : Where are the women ?
They were here! united in energetic protest,
penetrated with warm humanity, inspired by
one thought — to do their duty as wives and
mothers, to protect life, to fight against national
hatred, to guard civilisation, to further justice
— justice not only for their own country, but
for all countries of the world. The days in The
Hague gave fresh courage for new activity.
"Munich.

"LiDA GUSTAVA HEYMANN."

APPENDIX II

SOME PARTICULARS ABOUT THE
CONGRESS

How THE CONGRESS WAS CALLED

THE scheme of an International Congress of
Women was formulated at a small conference
of Women from neutral and belligerent countries,
held at Amsterdam, early in Febr. 1915. A
preliminary programme was drafted at this
meeting, and it was agreed to request the Dutch
Women to form a Committee to take in hand
all the arrangement for the Congress and to
issue the invitations.

FINANCE

The expenses of the Congress were guaranteed
by British, Dutch and German Women present
who all agreed to raise one third of the sum
required.

MEMBERSHIP

Invitations to take part in the Congress were
sent to women's organisations and mixed or-
ganisations as well as to individual women all
146

APPENDIX II

147

over the world. Each organisation was invited
to appoint two delegates.

Women only could become members of the
Congress and they were required to express
themselves in general agreement with the resolu-
tions on the preliminary programme. This
general agreement was interpreted to imply
the conviction a. That international disputes
should be settled by pacific means; b. That
the parliamentary franchise should be extended
to women.

CONDITIONS OF DEBATE

The Congress was carried on under two im-
portant rules :

1. That discussions on the relative national
responsibility for or conduct of the present war,

2. Resolutions dealing with the rules under
which war shall in future be carried on, shall be
outside the scope of the Congress.

COUNTRIES REPRESENTED

The United States of America, which sent
47 members; Sweden, which sent 12; Norway,
12; Netherlands, 1,000; Italy, i; Hungary, 9;
Germany, 28; Denmark, 6; Canada, 2; Bel-
gium, 5; Austria, 6, and Great Britain, 3, al-

148 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

though 1 80 others from there were prevented
from sailing owing to the closing of the North
Sea for military reasons.

The Congress, which was attended by a large
number of visitors as well as by the members,
was extremely successful. Proceedings were con-
ducted with the greatest goodwill throughout,
and the accompanying resolutions were passed
at the business sessions.

INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE CONGRESS

LEOP. KULKA, i A

~ ,, [Austria.

OLGA MISAR, J

EUGENIE HAMER, 1 p i •
MARGUERITE SARTEN, J >e gm

THORA DAUGAARD, } ~ .

r> T* \ Denmark.

CLARA TYBJERG, J

DR. ANITA AUGSPURG, 1

LIDA GUSTAVA HEYMANN, | Germany.

Secretary £5? Interpreter, J
CHRYSTAL MACMILLAN,

Secretary,

KATHLEEN COURTNEY,

Interpreter,

VILMA GLUCKLICH,

Great Britain and
Ireland.

ROSE GENONI, Italy.

APPENDIX II 149

DR. ALETTA JACOBS,

HANNA VAN BIEMA-HYMANS, AT i i j
0 Netherlands.

Secretary,

DR. MIA BOISSEVAIN,
DR. EMILY ARNESEN, }^
LOUISA KEILHAU, j

ANNA KLEMAN, 1 0 ,
^ TT [ Sweden.

EMMA HANSSON, J

JANE ADDAMS, President, { TT n A
FANNIE FERN ANDREWS, j

APPENDIX III

RESOLUTIONS1 adopted by the International
Congress of Women at The Hague, May i, 1915.

I. WOMEN AND WAR

i. PROTEST

We women, in International Congress as-
sembled, protest against the madness and the
horror of war, involving as it does a reckless
sacrifice of human life and the destruction of so
much that humanity has laboured through cen-
turies to build up.

2. WOMEN'S SUFFERINGS IN WAR

This International Congress of Women opposes
the assumption that women can be protected
under the conditions of modern warfare. It pro-
tests vehemently against the odious wrongs of
which women are the victims in time of war, and
especially against the horrible violation of women
which attends all war.

1 The discussion of these Resolutions and others which
were not carried is to be found in the official report of the
International Congress of Women at The Hague.
150

APPENDIX III 151

II. ACTION TOWARDS PEACE
3. THE PEACE SETTLEMENT

This International Congress of Women of
different nations, classes, creeds and parties is
united in expressing sympathy with the suffering
of all, whatever their nationality, who are fighting
for their country or labouring under the burden
of war.

Since the mass of the people in each of the
countries now at war believe themselves to be
fighting, not as aggressors but in self-defence
and for their national existence, there can be no ir-
reconcilable differences between them, and their
common ideals afford a basis upon which a magnan-
imous and honourable peace might be established.
The Congress therefore urges the Governments of
the world to put an end to this bloodshed, and
to begin peace negotiations. It demands that
the peace which follows shall be permanent and
therefore based on principles of justice, including
those laid down in the resolutions * adopted by
this Congress, namely:

That no territory should be transferred without
the consent of the men and women in it, and that
the right of conquest should not be recognized.

1 The Resolutions in full are Nos. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

152 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

That autonomy and a democratic parliament
should not be refused to any people.

That the Governments of all nations should
come to an agreement to refer future international
disputes to arbitration or conciliation and to
bring social, moral and economic pressure to
bear upon any country which resorts to arms.

That foreign politics should be subject to
democratic control.

That women should be granted equal political
rights with men.

4. CONTINUOUS MEDIATION

This International Congress of Women re-
solves to ask the neutral countries to take im-
mediate steps to create a conference of neutral
nations which shall without delay offer continuous
mediation. The Conference shall invite sugges-
tions for settlement from each of the belligerent
nations and in any case shall submit to all of them
simultaneously, reasonable proposals as a basis
of peace.

III. PRINCIPLES OF A PERMANENT PEACE

5. RESPECT FOR NATIONALITY

This International Congress of Women, recog-
nizing the right of the people to self-government,

APPENDIX III 153

affirms that there should be no1 transference of
territory without the consent of the men and
women residing therein, and urges that autonomy
and a democratic parliament should not be re-
fused to any people.

6. ARBITRATION AND CONCILIATION

This International Congress of Women, believ-
ing that war is the negation of progress and civili-
sation, urges the governments of all nations to
come to an agreement to refer future international
disputes to arbitration and conciliation.

7. INTERNATIONAL PRESSURE

This International Congress of Women urges
the governments of all nations to come to an
agreement to unite in bringing social, moral and
economic pressure to bear upon any country,
which resorts to arms instead of referring its case
to arbitration or conciliation.

8. DEMOCRATIC CONTROL OF FOREIGN POLICY

Since war is commonly brought about not by
the mass of the people, who do not desire it, but

xThe Congress declared by vote that it interpreted no trans-
ference of territory without the consent of the men and
women in it to imply that the right of conquest was not to
be recognized.

154 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

by groups representing particular interests, this
International Congress of Women urges that
Foreign Politics shall be subject to Democratic
Control; and declares that it can only recognise
as democratic a system which includes the equal
representation of men and women.

9. THE ENFRANCHISEMENT OF WOMEN

Since the combined influence of the women of all
countries is one of the strongest forces for the pre-
vention of war, and since women can only have
full responsibility and effective influence when
they have equal political rights with men, this
International Congress of Women demands their
political enfranchisement.

IV. INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION
10. THIRD HAGUE CONFERENCE

This International Congress of Women urges
that a third Hague Conference be convened im-
mediately after the war.

n. INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION

This International Congress of Women urges
that the organization of the Society of Nations

APPENDIX III 155

should be further developed on the basis of a con-
structive peace, and that it should include :

a. As a development of the Hague Court of
Arbitration, a permanent International Court of
Justice to settle questions or differences of a
justiciable character, such as arise on the inter-
pretation of treaty rights or of the law of nations.

b. As a development of the constructive work of
the Hague Conference, a permanent International
Conference holding regular meetings in which
women should take part, to deal not with the rules
of warfare but with practical proposals for further
International Cooperation among the States.
This Conference should be so constituted that it
could formulate and enforce those principles of
justice, equity and good will in accordance with
which the struggles of subject communities could
be more fully recognized and the interests and
rights not only of the great Powers and small
nations but also those of weaker countries and
primitive peoples gradually adjusted under an
enlightened international public opinion.

This International Conference shall appoint :
A permanent Council of Conciliation and In-
vestigation for the settlement of international
differences arising from economic competition,
expanding commerce, increasing population and
changes in social and political standards.

156 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

12. GENERAL DISARMAMENT

The International Congress of Women, advocat-
ing universal disarmament and realizing that it
can only be secured by international agreement,
urges, as a step to this end, that all countries
should, by such an international agreement, take
over the manufacture of arms and munitions of
war and should control all international traffic
in the same. It sees in the private profits accruing
from the great armament factories a powerful
hindrance to the abolition of war.

13. COMMERCE AND INVESTMENTS

a. The International Congress of Women urges
that in all countries there shall be liberty of
commerce, that the seas shall be free and the
trade routes open on equal terms to the shipping
of all nations.

b. Inasmuch as the investment by capitalists
of one country in the resources of another and the
claims arising therefrom are a fertile source of
international complications, this International
Congress of Women urges the widest possible
acceptance of the principle that such investments
shall be made at the risk of the investor, without
claim to the official protection of his government.

APPENDIX III 157

14. NATIONAL FOREIGN POLICY

a. This International Congress of Women de-
mands that all secret treaties shall be void and
that for the ratification of future treaties, the
participation of at least the legislature of every
government shall be necessary.

b. This International Congress of Women
recommends that National Commissions be
created, and International Conferences con-
vened for the scientific study and elaboration
of the principles and conditions of permanent
peace, which might contribute to the develop-
ment of an International Federation.

These Commissions and Conferences should
be recognized by the Governments and should
include women in their deliberations.

15. WOMEN IN NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL
POLITICS

This International Congress of Women declares
it to be essential, both nationally and inter-
nationally to put into practice the principle that
women should share all civil and political rights
and responsibilities on the same terms as men.

V. THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN

1 6. This International Congress of Women
urges the necessity of so directing the education

158 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

of children that their thoughts and desires may
be directed towards the ideal of constructive
peace.

VI. WOMEN AND THE PEACE SETTLEMENT
CONFERENCE

17. This International Congress of Women
urges, that in the interests of lasting peace and
civilisation the Conference which shall frame
the Peace settlement after the war should pass
a resolution affirming the need in all countries of
extending the parliamentary franchise to women.

1 8. This International Congress of Women
urges that representatives of the people should
take part in the conference that shall frame the
peace settlement after the war, and claims that
amongst them women should be included.

VII. ACTION TO BE TAKEN
19. WOMEN'S VOICE IN THE PEACE SETTLEMENT

This International Congress of Women resolves
that an international meeting of women shall
be held in the same place and at the same time as
the Conference of the Powers which shall frame
the terms of the peace settlement after the war
for the purpose of presenting practical proposals
to that Conference.

APPENDIX III 159

20. ENVOYS TO THE GOVERNMENTS

In order to urge the Governments of the world
to put an end to this bloodshed and to establish
a just and lasting peace, this International Con-
gress of Women delegates envoys to carry the
message expressed in the Congress Resolutions
to the rulers of the belligerent and neutral nations
of Europe and to the President of the United States.

These Envoys shall be women of both neutral
and belligerent nations, appointed by the Inter-
national Committee of this Congress. They
shall report the result of their missions to the
International Committee of Women for perma-
nent Peace as a basis for further action.

APPENDIX IV

MANIFESTO

ISSUED BY ENVOYS OF THE INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS
OF WOMEN AT THE HAGUE TO THE GOVERNMENTS
OF EUROPE AND THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED
STATES

HERE in America, on neutral soil, far removed
from the stress of the conflict we, the envoys to
the Governments from the International Congress
of Women at The Hague, have come together to
canvass the results of our missions. We put forth
this statement as our united and deliberate con-
clusions.

At a time when the foreign offices of the great
belligerents have been barred to each other, and
the public mind of Europe has been fixed on the
war offices for leadership, we have gone from capi-
tal to capital and conferred with the civil govern-
ments.

Our mission was to place before belligerent
and neutral alike the resolutions of the Inter-
national Congress of Women held at The Hague
160

APPENDIX IV 161

in April; especially to place before them the
definite method of a conference of neutral nations
as an agency of continuous mediation for the
settlement of the war.

To carry out this mission two delegations were
appointed, which included women of Great
Britain, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden,
and the United States. One or other of these
delegations were received by the governments in
fourteen capitals, Berlin, Berne, Budapest, Chris-
tiania, Copenhagen, The Hague, Havre (Belgian
Government), London, Paris, Petrograd, Rome,
Stockholm, Vienna, and Washington. We were
received by the Prime Ministers and Foreign
Ministers of the Powers, by the King of Norway,
by the Presidents of Switzerland and of the
United States, by the Pope and the Cardinal
Secretary of State. In many capitals more than
one audience was given, not merely to present our
resolutions, but for a thorough discussion. In
addition to the thirty-five governmental visits we
met — everywhere — members of parliaments
and other leaders of public opinion.

We heard much the same words spoken in
Downing Street as those spoken in Wilhelmstrasse,
in Vienna, as in Petrograd, in Budapest, as in the
Havre, where the Belgians have their temporary
government.

162 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

Our visits to the war capitals convinced us
that the belligerent Governments would not be
opposed to a conference of neutral nations ; that
while the belligerents have rejected offers of
mediation by single neutral nations, and while
no belligerent could ask for mediation, the crea-
tion of a continuous conference of neutral nations
might provide the machinery which would lead
to peace. We found that the neutrals on the other
hand were concerned, lest calling such a conference
might be considered inopportune by one or other
of the belligerents. Here our information from
the belligerents themselves gave assurance that
such initiative would not be resented. "My
country would not find anything unfriendly in
such action by the neutrals," was the assurance
given us by the foreign Minister of one of
the great belligerents. " My Government would
place no obstacle in the way of its institution,"
said the Minister of an opposing nation. "What
are the neutrals waiting for ?" said a third, whose
name ranks high not only in his own country,
but all over the world.

It remained to put this clarifying intelligence
before the neutral countries. As a result the
plan of starting mediation through the agency of
a continuous conference of the neutral nations
is to-day being seriously discussed alike in the

APPENDIX IV 163

Cabinets of the belligerent and neutral countries
of Europe and in the press of both.

We are in a position to quote some of the ex-
pressions of men high in the councils of the great
nations as to the feasibility of the plan. "You
are right," said one Minister, "that it would be
of the greatest importance to finish the fight by
early negotiation rather than by further military
efforts, which would result in more and more de-
struction and irreparable loss." "Yours is the
sanest proposal that has been brought to this
office in the last six months," said the Prime
Minister of one of the larger countries.

We were also in position to canvass the objec-
tions that have been made to the proposal, testing
it out severely in the judgment of those in the
midst of the European conflict. It has been
argued that it is not the time at present to start
such a process of negotiations, and that no step
should be taken until one or other party has a
victory, or at least until some new military balance
is struck. The answer we bring is that every
delay makes more difficult the beginnings of nego-
tiations, more nations become involved, and the
situation becomes more complicated; that when
at times in the course of the war such a balance
was struck, the neutrals were unprepared to act.
The opportunity passed. For the forces of peace

1 64 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

to be unprepared when the hour comes, is as
irretrievable as for a military leader to be unready.

It has been argued that for such a confer-
ence to be called at any time when one side has
met with some military advantage, would be to
favor that side. The answer we bring is that the
proposed conference would start mediation at a
higher level than that of military advantage.
As to the actual military situation, however, we
quote a remark made to us by a foreign Minister
of one of the belligerent Powers. "Neither
side is to-day strong enough to dictate terms, and
neither side is so weakened that it has to accept
humiliating terms."

It has been suggested that such a conference
would bind the neutral governments cooperating
in it. The answer we bring is that, as proposed,
such a conference should consist of the ablest
persons of the neutral countries, assigned not to
problems of their own governments, but to the
common service of a supreme crisis. The situa-
tion calls for a conference cast in a new and larger
mould than those of conventional diplomacy,
the governments sending to it persons drawn from
social, economic, and scientific fields who have
had genuine international experience.

As women, it was possible for us, from belliger-
ent and neutral nations alike, to meet in the midst

APPENDIX IV 165

of war and to carry forward an interchange of
question and answer between capitals which
were barred to each other. It is now our duty
to make articulate our convictions. We have
been convinced that the governments of the bellig-
erent nations would not be hostile to the insti-
tution of such a common channel for good offices ;
and that the governments of the European
neutrals we visited stand ready to cooperate
with others in mediation. Reviewing the situa-
tion, we believe that of the five European neutral
nations visited, three are ready to join in such a
conference, and that two are deliberating the
calling of such a conference. Of the intention
of the United States we have as yet no evidence.

We are but the conveyors of evidence which is
a challenge to action by the neutral governments
visited — by Denmark, Holland, Norway, Sweden,
Switzerland, and the United States. We in
turn bear evidence of a rising desire and intention
of vast companies of people in the neutral coun-
tries to turn a barren disinterestedness into
an active good-will. In Sweden, for example,
more than 400 meetings were held in one day in
different parts of the country, calling on the
government to act.

The excruciating burden of responsibility for
the hopeless continuance of this war no longer

166 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

rests on the wills of the belligerent nations alone.
It rests also on the will of those neutral govern-
ments and people who have been spared its shock
but cannot, if they would, absolve themselves
from their full share of responsibility for the
continuance of war.
Signed by

ALETTA JACOBS [Holland].

CHRYSTAL MACMILLAN [Great Britain].

ROSIKA SCHWIMMER [Austro-Hungary].

EMILY G. BALCH [United States].

JANE ADDAMS [United States].

APPENDIX V

INTERNATIONAL PLAN FOR CONTINU-
OUS MEDIATION WITHOUT ARMISTICE

BY JULIA GRACE WALES

Delegate from the University of Wisconsin to the
International Congress of Women at The Hague

DEFINITION

THE International Plan for Continuous Media-
tion without Armistice suggests that an Inter-
national Commission of experts be formed, to sit
as long as the war continues. The members of
the commission should have a scientific but no
diplomatic function; they should be without
power to commit their governments. The
Commission should explore the issues involved
in the present struggle, and in the light of this
study begin making propositions to the belliger-
ents in the spirit of constructive internationalism.
If the first effort fail, they should consult and
deliberate, revise their original propositions or
offer new ones, coming back again and again if
167

1 68 WOMEN AT THE HAGUE

necessary, in the unalterable conviction that some
proposal will ultimately be found that will afford
a practical basis for actual peace negotiation.
The Commission should be established without
delay, on neutral initiative.

CONDENSED ARGUMENT

Our argument for Continuous Mediation with-
out Armistice rests on the following convictions :

(1) That humanity should be able to find some
method of avoiding prolonged wholesale destruc-
tion;

(2) That on both sides there are people who
believe themselves to be fighting in self-defense,
who desire a right settlement, and who ought not
to have to fight against each other; that it is an
ultimate outrage against humanity that they have
to do so;

(3) That the only way to straighten the tangle
is to adopt and persistently employ the device
of placing simultaneous conditional proposals
("will you — if the rest will ?") before the bellig-
erents; that neither side can think correctly or
effectively unless it has among the data of its
thinking, exact knowledge as to how the enemy
(not merely the government but the various
elements of the people) would react to every
possible proposal for settlement;

APPENDIX V 169

(4) That truth tends to work on the mind,
and that to place sane standing proposals before
the nations would tend to ripen the time for peace ;

(5) That delay is dangerous because bitterness
and the desire for revenge are growing stronger,
and the civil power in all warring countries is
daily growing weaker in proportion to the mili-
tary;

(6) That there ought to be a commission of
experts sitting throughout the war and in some
way holding the possibilities of settlement before
the belligerents ; that world consciousness is try-
ing to break through; that a world thinking
organ should be created and that the creation of
such an organ at this juncture would concentrate
and render effective the idealism of all nations
and open the possibility of establishing upon a
deposed militarism, the beginnings of World-
Federation.

The following objection has been raised against
the neutral propaganda for Continuous Mediation
without Armistice.

The neutral argument assumes that both sides are
equally in the wrong — an assumption contrary
to truth and hence fundamentally immoral.

In reply to this charge we emphatically assert
that the neutral propaganda for Continuous
Mediation without Armistice, makes no such

170 WOMEN AT THE ,HAGUE

assumption. What it does assume is that in
any case there are some right-thinking people
on both sides. In an appeal for cooperation to
right-thinking people in all countries neutral
and belligerent, whatever their national prejudices
in connection with the present war, we believe
that it would be out of lace to dogmatize as to
which side, if either, represents the cause of in-
ternational righteousness for which we desire to
contend, in working for the establishment of
an international commission. We believe that
any nation sincerely fighting for the right has
nothing to fear from the plan and much to gain,
that the Plan is on the side of any country that
is on the side of international righteousness.
We believe that the plan of Continuous Mediation
without Armistice will tend to assist and reward
right motives in every country and to thwart wrong
motives. We believe that the citizen of any
country understanding our plan and believing
that his own country is fighting for the right will
feel that the plan is favourable to his own national
cause. We believe that the plan if carried out,
would, while thwarting short-sighted national
selfishness, tend to bring ultimate good to all
lands — the genuine and permanent benefit
which depends on the welfare of the family of
nations as a whole. Among those working for

APPENDIX V 171

the establishment of the International Commis-
sion are people of various national sympathies.
Probably there is no one working for the estab-
lishment of the International Commission who
has not a personal opinion as to which side on the
whole represents the cause of right. We feel
however, that difference of opinion as to the sin-
cerity of the belligerents, the responsibility of the
war, and the attitude which the various nations
will take in the settlement need not prevent us
from working together provided that we are
agreed in our desire for the establishment of a
permanent peace based on principles of inter-
national righteousness.

Printed in the United States of America.

T

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are relegated to their right places in the minds of men."

— Chicago Tribune.

Democracy and Social Ethics

J2mo, Cloth, Leather Back, $1.25

"Its pages are remarkably — we were about to say refreshingly —
free from the customary academic limitations . . . ; in fact, are the
result of actual experience in hand to hand contact with social
problems." — Review of Reviews.

The Spirit of Youth in the City Streets

i2mo, Cloth, $1.25

A protest against the practice of every large city of turning over to
commercialism practically all the provisions for public recreation,
leaving it possible for private greed to starve or demoralize the nature
of youth.

Twenty Years at Hull-House

Illustrated, Decorated Cloth, 8vo, $1.50

Jane Addams's work at Hull-House is known throughout the
civilized world. In the present volume she tells of her endeavors
and of their success — of the beginning of Hull-House, of its growth
and its present influence. For every one at all interested in the im-
provement of our cities, in the moral education of those who are
forced to spend much of their time on the streets or in cheap places
of amusement — " Twenty Years at Hull-House" will be a volume
of more than ordinary interest and value.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York

The Pentecost of Calamity

BY OWEN WISTER

Author of "The Virginian," etc.

Boards, i6mo, 50 cents

The author of " The Virginian " has written a new book which
describes, more forcibly and clearly than any other account so far
published, the meaning, to America, of the tragic changes which are
taking place in the hearts and minds of the German people.

Written with ease and charm of style, it is prose that holds the
reader for its very beauty, even as it impresses him with its force. It
is doubtful whether there will come out of the entire mass of war
literature a more understanding or suggestive survey.

'* Owen Wister has depicted the tragedy of Germany and has hinted at the
possible tragedy of the United States. . . . We wish it could be read in full
by every American." — The Outlook.

The Military Unpreparedness of the
United States

BY FREDERIC L. HUIDEKOPER

Cloth, 8vo, $4.00

By many army officers the author of this work is regarded as the
foremost military expert in the United States. For nine years he has
been striving to awaken the American people to a knowledge of the
weaknesses of their land forces and the defencelessness of the coun-
try. Out of his extensive study and research he has compiled the
present volume, which represents the last word on this subject. It
comes at a time when its importance cannot be overestimated, and
in the eight hundred odd pages given over to the discussion there
are presented facts and arguments with which every citizen should
be familiar. Mr. Huidekoper's writings in this field are already
well known. These hitherto, however, have been largely confined
to magazines and pamphlets, but his book deals with the matters
under consideration with that frankness and authority evidenced in
these previous contributions and much more comprehensively.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York

AN IMPORTANT NEW WORK

With the Russian Army

BY COL. ROBERT McCORMICK

Illustrated, 8vo, $2.00

This book deals with the author's experiences in the war area.
The work traces the cause of the war from the treaty of 1878 through
the Balkan situation. It contains many facts drawn from personal
observation, for Col. McCormick has had opportunities such as have
been given to no other man during the present engagements. He
has been at the various headquarters and actually in the trenches.
One of the most interesting chapters of the volume is the concluding
one dealing with great personalities of the war from first-hand ac-
quaintance.

The work contains a considerable amount of material calculated
to upset generally accepted ideas, comparisons of the fighting forces,
and much else that is fresh and original.

A Journal of Impressions in Belgium

BY MAY SINCLAIR

Cloth, i2tno, $1.30

May Sinclair is the latest English author who has written a book
as the outgrowth of the war, and a most unusual and fascinating
book it is, too. It is entitled " A Journal of Impressions in Belgium "
and records the mental effect produced by the war upon the dis-
tinguished novelist when she went to the front with an ambulance
corps. The journal cannot properly be termed a war book ; it is,
rather, a May Sinclair book in that it deals with her 'reaction to the
fighting and the experiences through which she passed, and not with
the military or technical side of the engagements. It is perhaps as
graphic a picture as has yet come to America from the war zone.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York

The Life of Clara Barton

BY PERCY H. EPLER

Decorated Cloth, Illustrated, $2.30

The life of Clara Barton, now written in full
for the first time, is of special interest when the
women of all nations are doing their share of
work in the various battlefields of Europe.
From the wealth of material at his disposal
the author has made a most fascinating book.
Miss Barton's friend, he has supplemented his
own knowledge of her with facts drawn from
her diaries, correspondence, lectures, and ad-
dresses. It has been his purpose, in so far as
is possible, to reveal the story of Miss Barton's
life through her own writings, and consequently
much use is made of hitherto unpublished manu-
scripts. The result is a vivid picture of a woman
whose passion for humanity was so great that
even though she was eighty years old she went
to the front at the beginning of the Spanish War.
Mr. Epler reviews Miss Barton's entire career
from her school-teaching days, through the bat-
tlefields of the Civil War, the Franco-Prussian
War, and the Spanish War, to her death.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York